


Still Life

by maplemood, TolkienGirl



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Height Differences, Sibling Bonding, contrived shirtlessness, only the romcom is full of angst, the concept is: Adam Driver and Kelly Marie Tran star in a romcom, therapeutic (and career-driven) baking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-03-12 23:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13557651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: They say life imitates art.Art is always a goddamn mess.(Or the story of how Sam York has not planned to be around for his sister's mid-life crisis, much less his sister's best friend.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, maplemood and I decided that the world needed a romcom starring Adam Driver and Kelly Marie Tran. (To be fair, it was at least in part inspired by Tumblr user @thefudge's gifset of "Tol and Smol"). Emmy Rossum stars as Adam's troubled sister.  
> Everything else belongs to us and maplemood's incredible playlist-making skills.

_“Well, I have made another choice.” –_ Molly _,_ _Emily Kinney_

Sam wakes up with a headache, no shirt, and three new voicemails.

_“Sam? This is Lucy. You don’t know who I am, but I know your sister. Can you give me a call back?”_

_“Hi Sam, it’s Lucy again. This is pretty important. Sondra really needs you. Can you please call me back?”_

_“Sam, I guess I’ll get right down to it. Third time’s a—never mind. Sondra’s in jail overnight and it would be really good if you were here when she gets released tomorrow. I promised her I’d get in touch with you.”_

…

French windows look great at night or with clean curtains. Sam crosses the floor, jeans gaping open, rubs the frayed edges of one drape between his fingers. It’s been burned.

“You’re up.” Tegan pads up beside him. Her feet and legs are bare. She’s wearing his shirt. She has glitter down one side of her neck, and it catches in the light like sparks.

“What happened to the curtain?”

“You and Billy lit it on fire last night. Remember?”

He doesn’t.

Tegan loops one tanned arm around his neck and bites him lightly on the shoulder. “This place is a fucking mess.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t remember when it got that way. Like—yeah, he remembers eating the pizza and drinking the beer at various points in time, but it seems vaguely disturbing that he’s never picked up a pizza box in who knows how long.

There are eight stacked under the television.

He disentangles himself from Tegan. His head is throbbing like he’s supposed to remember something. Maybe he’s got an exhibit downtown today. He finds his phone under a crumpled pillow. It’s after two-thirty in the afternoon.

His voicemail box is open, and he does remember, now. _Shit._

“I—I, uh, gotta go.” He flicks his eyebrows heavenward, like he’s going to depart by air.

Tegan hugs the shirt a little more tightly around herself. “Go? Where?”

Sam scratches the back of his neck and stares at her. He doesn’t remember a lot of last night, sure, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember _anything_. “Didn’t we…uh, break up?”

“We’ve been broken up for three weeks,” Tegan admits, rolling her eyes. She scrapes her hair back with both hands into some kind of fluffy, beachy ponytail, so that her—his—shirt falls open. “We’ve…forgotten a couple times. Like last night.”

 _Sondra’s in jail overnight_. He feels like something bad has crawled down his throat and settled there. “I’ve got to go see my sister.”

“Sondra?” Tegan’s lip curls.

“I only have one sister.” The words come out a little hard. And yeah, he’s not going to tell Tegan the details.

Tegan shrugs. “I’m dating Martin now, you know.”

He rakes his eyes over her, just to annoy her. “Does Martin know that?”

“Bye, asshole.” She slips on her shoes, and her skirt, and she tucks his shirt in without buttoning it.

Sam waits for what feels like twenty minutes while her footsteps drum down the stairs.

Then he rips down the torn curtains and gathers the pizza boxes and a bunch of other crap he doesn’t need or want, and throws all of it into a couple of garbage bags.

He texts back the number that left the voicemails—Lucy—that he’ll be there in about three and a half hours.

He doesn’t save the number to his phone.

…

Sondra lives in Schenectady, which Sam knows only as General Electric’s sad historical sarcophagus. He drives upstate with the window down, smoking three cigarettes that he hand-rolled last night in a drunken haze. There might or might not be some pot mixed in with the tobacco. He stays within five miles of the speed limit, just so he doesn’t have to find out.

Last time Sam saw Sondra, she and Keith and the kids were living in White Plains. He wonders what the hell happened, if Keith switched jobs.

Obviously something happened.

His hair is drying in the arrowed breeze, and probably getting wild. He flicks the cigarette away and shuts the window.

…

Upstate New York, from the Thruway, looks like a bad postcard.

He was done with this. He’s got a smudge of ink on his left index finger. He checked his calendar before he left the city. He has one commission for a show in the end of June. It’s May fifteenth.

He has sixteen days left on his lease.

Sam does not know what he’s doing.

Neither, apparently, does Sondra.

When Schenectady hulks into view, he needs to take a piss and he’s smoked one-and-a-half-more cigarettes with the window cracked this time. His phone keeps buzzing. Tegan’s sent him a photo, which he hasn’t bothered to look at, captioned _Miss me yet?_

The number he didn’t save—Lucy’s number—has sent him seven messages.

There is a gas station with a red-lettered sign that says GAS – BEER – LOTTO and it’s physically painful, feeling the grit and poor typography settle into his pores.

There is no art in Schenectady. The only thing that he has in common with most of the residents is the fact that he lights stuff on fire when he’s shitfaced.

Sam pulls off the road all the same. He doesn’t need gas—he stopped in Cairo—but he needs to read this Lucy girl’s paragraph-long epistles.

_Thank you so much for coming. She would have called you but wasn’t sure she’d get you on her one phone call._

_I’ll explain everything when you get here. 72 Hudson, btw. The twins are OK and with me. They are kind of upset but I told them Uncle Sam was coming…they didn’t remember you and I guess it’s been a while since they saw you._

_If I dnt answer door when u come pls just give me a ring. I might be vacuuming but will have my phone on._

He stops reading, it’s all more of the same. He looks at the picture of Tegan but it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. He presses delete, because he doesn’t want to deal with Tegan right now, and heads for a bathroom which has a yellow mirror and no toilet paper.

…

72 Hudson is a dump.

Sam checks the address twice and fixes his hair so that hey, if this is Sondra’s moment to screw up, he’s going to look good in comparison. Then he remembers Sondra isn’t even going to be here.

Maybe this Lucy chick is hot. Sam parks the car, locks it, and pulls out his phone. Calling seems weird. He types out, _I’m here_ , but he doesn’t send it. She said to try the door first.

He climbs cracked steps, doesn’t even lay a finger on the rusted wrought-iron handrail, which has one of those obnoxious curlicue patterns, and stares at Venetian blinds that look like nothing so much as a grinning row of bad teeth.

Sam knocks with the back of his knuckles.

He doesn’t expect anyone to answer, but the door flies open.

Sam is tall, but so was Tegan, so he forgets about it sometimes. He is fully looking over this girl’s head, though. He almost misses her, and then he looks down.

She’s probably not much over five feet. She’s got bangs pinned back with a tortoiseshell clip, big glasses, and she’s wearing a dress with tiny bowties printed all over it.

“Oh my God, you are huge!” she exclaims, then immediately claps a hand over her mouth as if she’s said something rude. She doesn’t stay that way for long, removes the same hand, and holds it out to him.

Sam is left-handed, and with his work, he forgets that people use their right hands to shake hands. Lucy—that’s who this must be—doesn’t give him a choice. She seizes his hand in her much, much smaller one, and gives it a few pumps.

“I’m Lucy Nguyen. Please come in.”

He follows her. The apartment is tiny. There’s a narrow hall that his shoulders will practically get stuck in if he turns the wrong way, and three doors open off of it. Lucy leads him through the second door. It’s a living room and kitchen combined. The kitchen is one of those horrible ones from the ‘70s, with the low-hanging cabinets.

“The twins are down for a nap,” Lucy says. “They were pretty worn out. I’ll make up the sofa bed for you. We can pick Sondra up at nine-thirty tomorrow.”

He sits down on the couch. His feet are planted on the floor and his knees feel like they’re at his chin. Keith is what, an accountant? He was a tremendous screw-up before he got married, but he was also pretty flush.

Is this all he can afford?

“So now that I’m here,” Sam says, feeling tremendously awkward than he has in the past decade. “What happened? What did Sondra do?”

Lucy smooths down the skirt of her dress. She’s not skinny, but she obviously doesn’t mind showing off her legs, judging from her hemline. Which, whatever, it’s not like he’s going to say anything. “I feel like Sondra will want to tell you the details, but I guess you need to know some stuff. Sondra caught…well, her no-good dickface husband was cheating on her, and she caught them. And they had something of a…physical altercation.”

He leaves the _no-good dickface_ part alone for now, can’t really handle processing it or whatever shit therapists call it, and says, while plucking at the purposely frayed threads on the knee of his jeans, “Physical altercation?”

“Sondra gave him a bloody nose.” Lucy lifts her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth in one movement.

“That sounds like Sondra.”

For some reason, that seems to annoy her. “That sounds like someone who just found their husband screwing someone else in their own bed while their kids are asleep in the next room. That’s what it sounds like.”

Sam doesn’t feel guilt. Not anymore. He had enough of it to count, at one point. So he’s not going to go there, not about Sondra, not about Keith. “So I’ve just got to crash here for a night to…be moral support at the police station in the morning?”

“Keith’s gone,” Lucy says, still staring at him. “Like…he left and took all his stuff. This was planned.” She sighs so hard it shakes her shoulders. “I’ve said too much. I don’t know you, Sam. But—Sondra’s going to need a lot, even if she can’t tell you all of it.” She picks up her car keys, which have a bunch of cupcake keychains attached, and he thinks she’s going to leave.

Instead, she puts her keys in her purse and turns on one of the burners on the stove. It flickers to blue gas-light.

Today feels too short and too long all at once.

“Do you want coffee or tea?”

“I want a whiskey, neat.”

“Well you’ve already had a couple hits,” she says, sniffing.

“It’s just tobacco.” It’s not.

“Ok,” she says. “Well, I’m going to stay here too, because I promised Sondra we’d have a responsible adult and…yeah. So. Is Darjeeling alright with you?”

He doesn’t drink tea. He also didn’t come here to be judged by a girl who’s approximately half his size, but it’s just not his day. “Sure.”

She can’t reach it. She huffs a little and gets one knee on the counter but then she can’t push herself off the floor with her other foot. Sam smirks and gets up, coming around behind her.

Everything next happens all at once. He sets a hand lightly on her bare ankle to move her a little out of the way, and she full-on shrieks and kicks him in the stomach, _hard_. Apparently having a six-pack of abs doesn’t matter against female panic. It _hurts_.

He lets a stream of rather colorful commentary. “What was that for?”

Her eyebrows are darting together like wings. “You touched my ankle!”

“I was trying to help get your fucking tea!”

“Hello, mister, there are _children_ in this house. We do not use that kind of language.” She hoists herself up with one final push, probably of rage, and opens the cabinet. “And I don’t _need_ help.”

He throws up his hang, legitimately pissed off now. “Fine. I’m going out to smoke.”

“You wave one ‘tobacco’ cigarette around in my presence, and I will flush everything you own down the nearest toilet, where it will be immediately eaten by rats.”

He thinks of cursing her out but decides that smiling in a superior fashion is much more satisfying. “I don’t think you could reach it if I hold it up here,” he says, raising his hand to shoulder-height.

She narrows her eyes at him, and honestly, he’s not sure how he got here, or what she’s going to do now, but the door opens again.

“I’m a nightmare,” says a kid, who must be one of Sondra’s, judging from the fact that she looks like Sondra at five, and that this is Sondra’s house.

Lucy immediately switches gears. She hops off the counter and rushes over. “Daisy, hon, did you have a nightmare? That’s OK. Nightmares are just our eyes running away with us when we put them to sleep!” She throws her arms around the kid.

 _Guilt._ Whoops, no. Also, not his job. Right? He’s been here ten minutes.

A pair of very accusatory brown eyes are watching him over Lucy’s shoulders.

“Who?” A sticky finger is pointing in his direction now, like God embellishing the Ten Commandments.

“Oh, that’s your Uncle Sam. Mommy’s brother. He’s just very tall. He is not scary.” Lucy says it like a command. It probably is. She straightens up and scoops Daisy’s hand into her own.

Daisy, that’s right. Sondra’s idea. Keith had thought it was stupid.

Last time Sam saw Daisy she was still in diapers.

Last time Sam saw any of them was the day of Mom’s funeral.

He does not think about that day, or quite a few others, and he _had_ decided that he was never getting involved with family again.

It feels like someone has reached out a firm hand and closed that chapter of that book.


	2. Chapter 2

_“Say what you want, but it’s hard when you’re young.”_ — Young, _The Chainsmokers_

He told the story whenever one of his friends got a little too bright-eyed around her. Sam’s always chalked it up to Sondra’s hair—up until the second time she shrugged off community college his sister wore it mermaid-style, rippling almost to her hips. Otherwise, they’re like two sides of the same scratched coin, and Sam knows he’s never had much in the way of a winning personality.

So.

He was eleven, she was sixteen. They were living (he thinks) in Morgantown while Dad finished up his Nursing degree, renting the crappier half of a slapped-together yellow duplex less than two blocks down from at least three frat houses. Perfect place to raise a growing family.

The Saturday mornings Mom worked he and Sondra would sneak out to McDonald’s, a half-mile walk across busy streets and sidewalks sloped practically vertical. Sondra had money, Sam didn’t. She’d buy him a couple hash browns, some biscuits in gravy if she was feeling generous. Then he’d chow down at one of the tables while Sondra slid into as booth beside some guy whose name he can’t remember.

Nathan, maybe, or Tyler; anyway, his name isn’t the point. The point is, one of those Saturday mornings, after three weeks of blowing their usual visits off, Sondra breezed in to see this guy sitting clear across the restaurant, in another booth, with another girl.

A college girl. Sam doesn’t remember how he knew, sure as shit doesn’t remember why it hadn’t clicked into place for him before then: Tyler or Nathan or whatever the hell his name was had to be at least two years too old for his sister.

But this isn’t really the point of the story either.

Sondra froze between the still-swinging door and the CAUTION—WET FLOOR sign. He heard her breathe in, one huge, drowning gulp. Then she hooked her fingers into her pocket and yanked out a five-dollar bill.

“Get me some coffee.”

“Let’s go home.” He was stupid, not an idiot.

“Jesus, Sam!” she hissed, and it felt like every eye in that McDonald’s was fixed on them. Sondra in her cutoffs and too-tight bra, him just barely shorter than she was, too tall to hide behind her. “I need to pee. Get in line.”

“Then we’ll leave,” he said, stolid, still apparently stupid enough to trust her.

“Yeah.” Sondra wasn’t looking at him. “Then we’ll leave.”

He was at the register, so wrapped up in not looking over at the nameless one and his new girl that he was forgetting whether she usually ordered a medium or a large, when Sam heard the bathroom door slam.

His first instinct, which he remembers crystal clear, to this day, was to bolt for the back exit. He didn’t, because that would have been weird.

The other thing he remembers crystal clear? To this day? Sondra striding toward the booth, a little unsteadily but briskly, with purpose, long braid bouncing between her shoulders, clutching something in her right hand. Something crumpled and soaked red and—

_Shit._

When Sam thinks back to those years, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, he pictures one enormous zigzag up and down the east coast. New York. Delaware. Virginia, North Carolina. Heading inland, West Virginia, for a while. Then back to New York. He pictures that, but the zigzag is red, because mostly he pictures Sondra, his sister, mashing her used maxi pad into some girl’s face.

…

The story didn’t work on Keith. He loved it, got Sam to retell it twice before he officially met Sondra, coaxing out more gory details each time; it doesn’t say much for Keith.

But, Sam’s come to realize, it doesn’t say much for him, either.

…

It’s like the universe is conspiring to keep that patch of crazy at the forefront of his mind. The Darjeeling is...fine; since he doesn’t drink tea Sam has no point of comparison, other than that Lucy could stand to go easier on the sugar. She ladled three spoonfuls into her mug, two into his.

“Too much?” she asked, not sounding particularly bothered.

“It’s fine.”

They sit on either side of the kitchen table (Lucy’s already shepherded Daisy back to bed) in silence that grows steadily more and more uncomfortable. Sam tries breaking it a couple times with questions, about Sondra, about Keith, about the someone else he was screwing on their mattress. Lucy isn’t biting. “You’re going to need to ask her,” she keeps saying, not exactly unpleasantly but not exactly pleasantly, either. “Anyway—” she stirs her tea. Vigorously. “I’m not exactly an unbiased source.”

“And Sondra is?” If he sounds pissed off, well, he is pissed off. It’s been, four, five hours, and he still knows about as much as he did this afternoon.

“Point taken,” says Lucy, and now there is a very definite edge to her voice, like maybe she’s starting to rethink this calling-up-your-friend’s-estranged-brother business, and, you know what? Maybe she should.

Sam drums his fingers on the table, traces them along the magic-marker scribbles littering its surface. One of the kids has a lot of artistic enthusiasm, if not much else.

Lucy stirs. Grumbles. Stirs some more.

“Sorry about that,” she says. “It’s been a day.”

Nothing else to do. He nods.

“I was thinking…” she casts a slightly wistful look from fridge to cabinets, and if Sam still knows anything about Sondra he can already tell that the contents of said cabinets won’t be expiring in the next fifty years, possibly even the next hundred. “...well, I promised the twins Happy Meals, so.” She points her spoon at him. “How do you feel about McDonald’s?”

Ten minutes later Sam is pulling into the drive-thru, squinting at the very specific list Lucy’s scribbled on the back of a hair-salon receipt. _Daisy—Mcnug.’s, ff_ (French fries, he assumes) _, milk w/straw. Ben—Cheeseb., ff, chocolate milk w/straw—green monster w/purple tentacles for both._

Her handwriting is spikier than he’d have thought it would be, small. It’s like trying to read a line of barbed wire.

For herself, Lucy’s written, _Double ¼ pounder, large ff, Sprite._ For Sam, _???_

Near the bottom she scribbled, _My treat_.

He did try arguing her on that point. Lucy rolled her eyes, stuffed another bill into his hands, and jabbed those last two words down like a threat.

Fine.

Window rolled down, he smells hot grease and salt, heavy on the warm air, mixing with ripe garbage. A bottom-heavy girl with a burgundy ponytail drags a full bag to the dumpster directly across from the drive-thru window. When she catches Sam staring, she rolls her eyes, starts to flip him the finger, then, last minute, switches gears and waves.

He waves back.

It doesn’t smell good. It smells like a homecoming, so good has jack-all to do with it.

Sondra doesn’t drink McDonald’s coffee anymore. She likes their fries and their burgers. Not much else.

He wonders if she pulled the same trick this time. It’s not a surprise. None of it. He wonders if this Lucy girl is surprised, if she would be if she knew about the stuff Sondra’s been known to get up to in restaurants, in basements, hell, in other people’s bedrooms.

He wonders why Lucy seems to be the only friend his sister has.

“Sir?” A kid ducks through the window. “It’ll be five minutes.”

Sam settles back in his seat. “Take your time.”

…

The kids aren’t coming out of their room.

The twins, he thinks, turning them into a single unit, pointed fingers, brown eyes, two sets of lungs that never quit. Not from what he remembers.

“Sorry,” says Lucy. She sounds more tired than sorry, more uncertain than anything else. “They’re a little afraid of everyone right now.”

At least she’s not still looking at him like she’s expecting Sam to hot box the entire apartment with Daisy and Ben still in it.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I haven’t been around.”

Lucy makes some small, uncategorizable noise. “I’d better go in there and eat with them. I just don’t want to make another scene. You know, after.”

He doesn’t ask her if the they woke up during the whole thing. Whether they stepped into the hall to see Mom whaling on Dad. Who knows, it could have been a regular thing around here.

He tried to put more faith in Sondra. He was trying before today.

“Sam,” Lucy says.

He looks down at her. “Nine-thirty tomorrow. I got it.”

It’s seven-thirty. He’s been up only about six hours, but driving for three of those hours. He’s beat.

She hesitates a second longer. “You can make up the sofa bed?”

He’s too tired to cover the spark of annoyance in his gut with another smirk. “I’m pretty sure.”

That noise again. “There’s sheets and an extra quilt in Sondra’s closet,” Lucy says, and turns to head back to the twins’ room. Sam hears them knocking around, chattering to each other with those big, taking-up-space voices kids have, like they’ve never stopped to listen to themselves (why should they?). The door, though, is very pointedly shut.

“Hey,” he says as she goes to open it. Lucy turns her head.

“What?”

“You and Sondra.” He motions his hands through the air between them like he’s trying to shape it. “I’m just trying to picture this here.”

“Yeah?” she smiles. There’s a sharpness to it. “Friend of a friend. Of a friend.”

“You two don’t seem like you’d be in the same circle,” he says. “Of friends.” Because Sondra has never been great at making friends, especially since the kids. It’s not that she thinks all other women are rivals, but that she thinks all other people are, generally speaking, too much to bother with. Sam being no exception to that.

“Well,” says Lucy, “things work out the way they’re going to work out.” Her voice is tight; he wonders, too late, if there was a better way to phrase that.

Probably not. Again, they’re two sides of a coin.

She lifts her chin to stare at him. Her bangs are starting to straggle out of their clip. The bow tie skirt somehow looks a little wilted. “Good night, Sam.”

…

Keith and Sondra’s room—Sondra’s room, as of today—is a mess. Clearly Lucy’s tried to go through, make the bed, run the vacuum, but there’s an honest-to-God dent in the drywall right next to the door, so her efforts don’t hide much. In the closet Sam finds a cardboard box, and in that box, stacked neatly, is more or less every single photo of Keith, or Keith and the kids, or Keith and the kids and Sondra, that’s ever been taken. There’s even the framed group shot from their wedding. He remembers that in the very next shot Sondra, who was supposed to be kissing Keith, turned the other way and laid a big one on Sam’s cheek. He wonders if that photo’s buried at the bottom with the rest.

Lucy must have taken them all down, too. She knows his sister that much.

He pulls down the quilt, and a set of Care Bear sheets. He pulls out the sofa bed, he makes the sofa bed, and he sleeps.

Badly.

At some point Lucy herds the kids down the hall to the bathroom, probably to brush their teeth and get into pajamas. The twins mutter among themselves, in a way that’s making Sam wonder, already, if these kids have any friends besides each other. Lucy hushes them with a quick “Shh! Uncle Sam is sleeping.”

Another mutter, which he translates, without help, as “Screw Uncle Sam.”

 _I know your sister._ He still has no idea where or how these two could have met. In the end, it’s none of his business, but again, Sondra’s not one to pick up a copy of _How to Win Friends and Influence People_. Last he heard, most of her friends were Keith’s, and Lucy isn’t the kind of girl Keith would have even the mildest interest in.

It’s a puzzle. Until tomorrow, Sam has nothing better to mull over.

He rolls over, exchanging the spring digging into his back for another digging into his side. He can’t sleep on his stomach; there’s a bruise blooming there, size nine and-a-half, wide. Sam’s feet dangle over the edge of the bed. So do his arms if he stretches them out. The entire mattress sags a little under his weight.

At maybe twelve, one o’clock in the morning, something clambers over his side and almost kicks him in the head.

“Jesus!” He was half-asleep, and he shoots through the layers of half-asleep, half-awake, and wide awake too quickly. It’s like the moment you step off one of those fairground Gravitrons and suddenly need to puke. “ _Fuck_.”

“Sam,” it says experimentally.

He gropes for his phone. Another text—Tegan, again. Sam ignores it, again, and turns the glow from the screen on whichever rugrat has decided to start a midnight game of Hop-on-Pop.

Ben.

“Ben?” Sam asks.

The kid stares like it’s a stupid question. It is a stupid question. He’s small, already stocky in a pair of drawstring Spider-Man pajama pants. Sondra’s hair, but the rest is pure Keith.

“I’m Ben,” he says. Then, “You’re up.”

“I am now.” Sam rubs his face. Down south, a third spring’s begun to dig into his ass. “What’s the matter? Do you need a glass of water or something?”

He used to bug Sondra for mugs of hot chocolate in the middle of the night, probably before she even hit the double digits. Mom mixed the Swiss Miss in with water, Sondra used hot milk. World of difference.

“I need Mommy,” Ben says, so matter-of-fact only an idiot would miss that it’s not a general _I-want-her-where-is-she_ , but a specific _I_ need _Mommy. Now._ Apparently Sam’s that idiot. The “Sorry, bud,” is barely past his lips when the sheets, the mattress, and his shirt (Ben’s wormed his way right up against Sam’s side) soak wet and hot.

“Shit!”

Strictly speaking, he’s woken up to worse. That thought alone is the only thing keeping him from kicking his only nephew off the side of the bed.

Sam scrambles off himself. “Shit,” he repeats in a furious whisper. The kid blinks up at him, sticks a finger in his mouth.

“This is my only shirt,” he hisses. “I didn’t bring another.”

Ben uncorks for a second. “Why?”

Good question. Sam was sure he packed one. Then again, he was sure he packed quite a few things, like deodorant and a fresh pair of socks and a toothbrush, which he can only blame on some kind of not-quite-post-hangover, post-Tegan fug (and no, it’s not fair to blame her, but whatever), because now he’s here in the asshole of Schenectady with one shirt, two pairs of jeans, a couple spare sets of boxer shorts, and a mouthful of mossy teeth.

None of which is the kid’s fault.

Sam sucks down a deep, centering breath. Watches Ben pick at the drenched crotch of his pants, his head hung and his shoulders hunched to bony little points.

“Okay,” he says. “You. Bathroom. Now.”

He pulls off the quilt and strips the sheets. Those go in the tub; Sam plugs it and makes sure the faucet’s twisted to cold, but not freezing.

“Get in.”

Ben shakes his head.

“Bud, you just pissed your pants.” Sam rakes a hand backwards through his hair. “Get in. Put the pants in, too.”

He’s not an expert on baby piss, but cold water washes out everything. Right? And might as well get everything done in one load. Sam pulls his own shirt over his head, adds it to the broth.

“Too cold?”

Another shake. Ben looks so small. He _is_ small, jaundiced under the god-awful fluorescent lights, stomping on the waterlogged quilt. 

 _Where are you,_ Sam finds himself thinking, as if he doesn’t know. _Come on, Sondra. Get your ass back home._

“What’s that?” his nephew pokes two pruney fingers at Sam’s gut.

“A bruise.”

“Who gave it to you?” Ben asks, solemnly; is he more talkative than his sister usually or just better with strangers?

Sam’s sleep-stupid brain is stuttering between two answers, both equally bullshit, when she pipes up behind him.

“What’s going on?”

He turns. Lucy stands in the doorway, heavy-eyed, her hair loose around her face and the rest of her loose under sweatpants and a faded green T-shirt. Daisy crowds behind her, the hem of her Daisy Duck nightgown twisted in one fist.

“Ben?” Lucy continues, not waiting for Sam’s answer. “Did you have an accident?”

Like the kid’s been waiting for the cue the entire time he nods, and, completely straight-faced, starts pissing again. Right in the tub.

Sam’s on the very edge of a coronary. He can feel it building in his bloodstream. “The toilet’s right there,” he snaps. “ _Right there._ What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s _wrong_ with him!” Lucy snaps, barreling forward to land a smack upside the back of Sam’s head, and Daisy yanks her nightgown even higher and lets out a thin, piercing wail, and Ben says, “I want Mommy,” like that explains everything (It does. Of course it does.), and it’s all too. Fucking. Much.

Sam unfolds off the edge of the tub, to his full height. “If nothing was wrong I wouldn’t be here!” he snaps. Daisy wails louder.

“I called you because they need help,” Lucy seethes. “You’re not helping!”

He can’t explain it, but her face, tired, puffy, scrubbed clean of makeup and sympathy, is about the most infuriating thing he’s seen today.

“I’m not helping?” He smacks his palm against the wall. “How much help does Sondra need? Exactly? Because I’m not becoming a permanent fucking fixture around here!”

Maybe she jumps. Maybe she doesn’t. “It’s not only Sondra,” Lucy says, low and venomous. “The twins need help. _I_ need help.”

No vulnerability there. No softness. She’s all threat.

“Kid,” Sam growls. “I barely know you.”

For some reason that gets under her skin more than anything else. “ _Kid_? Okay, asshole, we’re six months apart. Six months!” She holds up the fingers like this is preschool.

That...frankly he doesn’t believe it, but whatever.

“Look,” says Sam. “I don’t know how long you’ve known Sondra—”

“Two years,” she snaps.

“What?”

“I’ve known your sister two years.” Lucy’s eyes glitter up at his. “I know what I’m getting into.”

“You can help her all you want,” he says. “And she’ll say thanks and nod her head and go right the fuck the other way.”

“Wow.”

“Wow what?”

“You sound exactly like she sounds,” Lucy says, “when she talks about you.”

If that insight’s supposed to cut him to the bone, it’s missed its mark. “Obviously. We grew up together.” And, yeah, he’s well aware he sounds like a self-righteous asshole, and that Sondra—rightfully—sees him as a screw-up, but that doesn’t make her any less of one in comparison.

Lucy opens her mouth to fire back, and Sam is already prepping a response when he feels a tug on his hand.

“I need pants,” Ben says, and points to what’s marinating in the tub like they might have forgotten. “I’m cold,” he says a second later, and then, “I want Mommy,” and looks at Sam like he can fix all of that with a snap of his fingers, or maybe by clicking his heels together three times.

But all Sam can get him is a towel.

“We’re going to go see your mom tomorrow,” he says. His voice sounds canned. He glances over at Lucy, who’s struggling to pick up a still-sniffling Daisy, her face stricken, and he’s thinking about her whole little _there are_ children _in this house_ speech when she looks at him and mouths, _Shit_.

Damage control. He gets the message.

“Really?” Ben is asking from the depths of the very bath towel Sam remembers being part of the set he got Sondra as a wedding gift, only to have her drop, months later, that she’s apparently always hated the color lavender.

“Yeah, bud, really,” he says, feeling the shitty paper-plate thin walls closing in with him, the color of crusted mayonnaise and enclosing all his sister’s stuff; her friend, her kids, her whole life, none of which, historically, Sam has been very good to, any more than they’ve been good to him.

Lucy makes another of those noises, some kind of half-snort, half- _tssk_ in the back of her throat. He’s not sure if this time she’s trying to express sympathy or back him up or what, but Sam wishes to God she’d stop.

…

The drive to the station stretches on a lot longer than the actual length in miles, thanks to all that’s come before it. At eight Sam dragged himself off the still sour-smelling mattress to grab his shirt from where it’d been drip-drying on the towel-rack (laundry’s in the basement of the building—he could drag it all down but hasn’t yet). Lucy was in Sondra’s bedroom, on her phone.

“Yes, I am qualified to say that’s just like him after only one day. No. _No_. You have no idea—”

She drives. She’s a tailgater.

Sam doesn’t mention it.

He’d expected Sondra to have picked up a minivan by now, but she’s kept the same rattling station wagon he remembers from high school, with the concession of two enormous car seats strapped into the back.

“Everything okay back there?” he asks now, since it seems like something somebody with a vague sense of responsibility would say. Lucy’s disappeared through the frosted, blind doors of the station with a tense, “Watch the kids.”

Now he twists, one elbow whacking against the glove apartment, to actually look at them. Ben returns his stare. Daisy glares out the window.

“She doesn’t like you,” her brother adds helpfully.

Fantastic.

“Daisy,” he says.

She stuffs a finger in her ear.

“I’m sorry,” he says anyway, not like it’ll help. “It wasn’t about you. Okay?”

 _It’s about your mom,_ Sam doesn’t say. _It’ll always be about her._

“Aunt Lucy doesn’t like you, either.” Ben kicks against his straps. “But I do.”

He doesn’t say it earnestly, or cutely, just simply. Like it’s a fact. When he hardly remembers Sam—and Sam, up until yesterday, hardly remembered him. The kid strains against the buckles, neck arched, trying to stare over Sam’s head to the station door.

“When’re they coming back out?”

“Soon,” Sam says, restless fingers rummaging through the glove compartment, the cup holder, for something to distract them with. Something to distract himself. He hasn’t picked up a pen in two days. He swallows back the certainty that whatever artistic talent he does have is slowly, surely circling down the toilet. It comes right back up, like bile.

Fuck, like that’s even important right now.

Lucy cried on the way over. Sniffled, really; Sam looked over and she was using the back of one hand to rub at her nose.

“What’s the matter?” He shouldn’t have asked. Even if he did care, he somehow couldn’t make himself sound like he cared. Her opinion of him seemed pretty much set, anyway.

“Allergies.”

He remembered the phone call. Hadn’t stuck around to snoop on the rest of it, but he’d heard her voice snapping back in the kitchen. The walls in Sondra’s place really are shit.

“Come on,” Sam said, seconds before a navy-blue sedan cut them off. Lucy’s knuckles whitened on the wheel.

“Not all my problems have something to do with you,” she said, too calmly. “Let’s focus on Sondra, okay?”

Sure. Let’s.

He remembers his sister crying. It’s a particular background track to particular parts of his life; their bedrooms shared a wall in Morgantown and he heard her the night after Nathan-Tyler’s new girl got a faceful of her blood, broken, furious. He remembers thinking he should go in and talk to her.

Sam remembers he didn’t.

And, as if the memory’s enough to call her up, like some sort of guilt-triggered genie, the twins both jump in their seats, Ben yells, “Mommy!”, and Sam jerks his head up to see her face in the window, his sister, pasty and tired, a splatter of zits reddening the underside of her jaw, the dark circles under her eyes like smears of pencil-shavings.

She taps the window, cranks her hand.

Sam rolls it down.

“Hey,” Sondra says, the smile in her voice as tired as the rest of her.

“Hey, stranger,” Sam says, and the smile cracks onto her face. She ducks her head in a little, then, suspicious, sniffs at his hair.

“Shit, Duke.” Sondra rolls her eyes. “Have you been smoking again?”


	3. Chapter 3

_“Don’t let your heart get heavy—child, inside you there’s a strength that lies.” —_ Be Here Now, _Ray LaMontagne_

For the first three months of decorating cupcakes, Lucy has to set her right elbow on a firm surface and hold her wrist with her left hand.

It’s awkward.

But steadiness is the point—always the point. You don’t get good at buttercream roses if your hand is shaking.

The steady hand thing is one of the true rules. Other rules, like, _no music when you’re baking, it’s a distraction_ , are total BS. Lucy listens to Taylor Swift (a lot) and also Gloria Gaynor and a fair amount of Kesha while she does her practice piping. She swears it helps.

Albany is its own reason. It is far away from New Jersey, for one thing, while the Big Apple is not. Albany is underrated—it actually has a fair amount of fine dining places, and most importantly, it has Alessandra.

Alessandra is the reason Lucy gives when asked, _why Albany_. Alessandra Ricci, reclusive, eccentric, brilliant.

But if anyone’s asking, it’s because they don’t understand the parameters of her dream in the first place, and so Alessandra and brilliance and the way you’ve got to keep your arm steady for those damn buttercream roses don’t mean much to them.

…

Lucy meets Sondra because Schenectady isn’t _actually_ the complete trash-heap everyone thinks it is.

There is a farmers’ market—well, it’s called Green Market, technically—that runs from May onward every year. They sell soap and stained glass art and big heads of cabbages with worm-eaten edges, but it’s OK because that means no pesticides. Alessandra is in the habit of sending an intern (she always has an intern, but they tend to fade quickly) there with a themed display.

Alessandra never goes herself.

Lucy, so far, has not faded. Two buttercream roses a minute, and she’s getting faster.

For the first farmers’ market, Lucy remembers the date—May twentieth—because it is three days after her dad’s birthday.

As of that date, Lucy had not called him for three years.

“You have a surgeon’s hand,” Alessandra had said the night before, rounding out her consonants as usual.

The worst part was that Lucy had winced and thought it was a compliment at the same time.

(It wasn’t.)

She wonders, to this day, if Alessandra did some background digging. A Google search isn’t enough—thank God—but Cornell probably keeps their student records somewhere.

Those are the days she cranks Kesha up.

…

So, Sondra.

Sondra knows Kelly and Kelly knows Amalia.

Amalia has the stall next to Lucy’s cupcakes. Amalia does face painting. This morning there are triplets, probably eight or nine years old, who have been transformed into matching tigers.

Lucy makes sure to tell them that their whiskers and orange-and-black flecked jowls are fierce.

“Lulu!” Amalia’s nickname for her is unendorsed, but that doesn’t bother Amalia. “Get your ass over here!”

 _Over here_ , of course, being one booth across.

Amalia is setting out new colors but also jabbering away with two moms pushing strollers.

One of the moms is Kelly, who has an overgrown blonde pixie and a three-year-old daughter named Rowan. Lucy has met her once.

The other mom, the one with the three-year-old twins kicking their heels against their seats—

Well. The other mom is Sondra.

Lucy is a firm believer in friends-at-first-sight. Maybe it isn’t always for the right reasons, but she thinks that when your own insides are building up the cliff, you’ve got to leap off it sometime.

(Later, when she sees Sam, she will go through a different iteration of the same feeling, only this time, when she sees those hurricane eyes and that antelope grace, she will stop herself. She will not leap.)

…

The second time Lucy sees Sondra is three weeks after the first.

Lucy has been thinking, in these three weeks, how she needs a new friend. Third-grade Lucy, playground-and-pigtails Lucy, had almost more friends than she could count.

When the thought spirals behind her eyelids at night, she keeps thinking back to Sondra’s warlike posture and deer-in-the-headlights eyes.

(Both of these observations will turn out to be wrong, but only by half.)

Lucy is in the process of buying a new washing machine. On the universe’s demonic chalkboard of Things You Never Learned About Being a Grownup, this ranks maybe fifth or sixth.

In other words, it _sucks_.

She brings a spiral notebook, unlined, and one of those pens that smears a bit if she lets the side of her hand drop to the paper.

(Steadiness is the point.)

If she was bolder, or taller, or both, she would hop onto the free-standing dryer and kick her legs against it. Crank up some tunes, live inside the indie movie that will soften the imperfect edges of her life.

Instead, she settles for a dark green plastic lawn chair that has a spiderweb threaded in the hollow of its leg. Lucy makes sure her ankles are outside the range of even the most ambitious jumping spider, and opens the notebook.

“Fucking shit-ass _shit_!”

The world’s most profane slam poetry, maybe.

But actually, it’s Sondra.

The handle of Sondra’s laundry basket has broken, and there are little kiddie socks and Batman t-shirts strewn across the floor.

Lucy jumps up, notebook forgotten, and runs to help her.

This is exactly the core of their friendship, and it’s the one thing she never regrets.

“You heard that, huh?” Sondra asks. There is mascara smeared onto her cheek, but it doesn’t matter.

“Little bit.” Lucy pauses, hands full of towels. They were probably lavender once, but there are bleach stains on them now. “Hey, you were at the farmers’ market, right? You have twins, right?”

Maybe that’s too many questions. But Sondra’s mouth twists into a wry smirk. “Yeah. I’m Sondra. Liver of some shit-ass shit.”

“I’m Lucy.” And Lucy beams, because she is starting over, starting over, and she built all of her own cliffs.

They reach the sky.

“I like you,” Sondra says. “And I don’t like a lot of people.”

Lucy doesn’t doubt it. She also doesn’t deny that it makes her feel good, having someone like her.

She isn’t supposed to want that, she is stronger than that. _Oops._

“I should be shopping for washers,” Lucy says. “But I guess it’s lucky I was here.”

“My husband punched the side of ours in,” Sondra answers, hoisting the wayward basket onto one jutting hip. She tucks a stray curl behind her ear. “He’s an idiot.”

“Your idiot?” Lucy wants it to be true, because the alternative isn’t pretty.

“Yes.” And she doesn’t even say it resignedly. She says it kind of sharply, possessively.

Lucy nods. She can deal with this. It’s not her damage, basically. Lucy’s house didn’t ring with the kind of arguments that pound and concave metal like that. Mostly silences, and then suitcases, and then—

Sondra moves over to the dryer, near Lucy’s abandoned chair. She cocks her head, eyes settling on the  discarded notebook. “You draw?” There’s something soft in her voice.

Lucy scrambles for it. In snatching it up, she knocks it open.

“What are those?”

“They’re cupcakes. I mean—plans for cupcakes.” And this is stupid, it’s really stupid because Lucy doesn’t actually design her cupcakes by drawing. It’s a futile exercise that’s totally contrived to start with and she doesn’t know why she thought she’d try today. Full commitment to the hypothetical indie movie, maybe.

“My little brother’s an artist.” Sondra smiles. It makes her look younger, and more stable, all at once.

“Wow.” Lucy closes the notebook after what seems like a polite pause. She doesn’t want it to seem like she’s hiding something. Her cupcakes are not a private endeavor. “That’s cool.”

“He’s also an idiot.”

“Your idiot?” Lucy hitches up the corners of her mouth, trying for a grin.

Sondra’s face falls. “Not so much anymore.”

…

Sam gets out of the car. Lucy gets in the driver’s seat, to give them privacy or something, but they don’t hug. It makes Lucy want to get back out and wrap her arms around Sondra again, except she already did that inside of the station.

Daisy starts asking for juice.

Lucy hears Sam say, “On and off.”

“Still making a cocktail of it, by the smell of it.”

“Hmm.”

“ _Juice_.” Daisy rolls her head from one side to the other. Her mouth is buttoned up in a frown. “I want juice.”

“Hi, mommy!” Ben starts pounding on the back window. He’s not agitated, just excited. That’s Ben all over. There is some ribbon of enthusiasm and charm that he gets from his dad. The good parts. Lucy doesn’t know why she knows that, because Lucy hated Keith from the first moment she met him, and nothing has ever changed that.

To be fair, Sondra never disagreed with her.

Sondra bends down, hand on Ben’s window, like she can reach her son through glass. “I’m here, baby.”

“I peed on Uncle Sam,” Ben confides.

“What?”

Lucy loves Sondra, but she wishes she would just get in the car.

“I _peed_ on _Uncle Sam_.”

Sam gets in the front. Doesn’t even ask his sister if she wants it.  Lucy grinds her molars. She doesn’t ask herself _how did I end up here?_ because she has never forgotten the reason.

Sondra is her own reason.

Sondra gets in the back, clambering in between the twins’ car-seats like a teenage babysitter. “Push up your seat, Duke.”

Sam rolls his eye and pulls up his seat. His knees are almost hitting his chin. Lucy realizes, belatedly, that he is way too big to fit in the backseat. She decides, quite objectively, that she is still going to resent him.

…

_No, asshole. We don’t look like we belong in the same circle of friends. I’m short and chubby, right? That’s what you’re thinking. You’re staring at my stomach. You don’t get it._

Lucy cried last night, but it was not because of that. It wasn’t.

Sam tips his head back, so that his ridiculous hair—getting a little greasy—flops off his forehead. If Lucy looks to the right, she has an uninhibited view of his throat. He’s got the kind of collarbone that girls drink tequila out of at parties.

Lucy glares through her oncoming headache, straight ahead, like an arrow or a bullet or something that hits a mark and obliterates everything in its path.

She takes a left turn. Traffic is at a crawl, even though it’s the middle of the day and some people have jobs.

She wonders what Sam does for a living.

 _My little brother’s an artist_.

“I called the diner,” Lucy says, because she has to say something. She hopes it’s not a massive betrayal of Sondra’s pride, saying it in front of Sam, who they _definitely_ should not have called. “I told them you were taking a sick day.”

 _Think happy thoughts_.

Sondra acknowledges that with a yawned, “OK.”

Sam coughs out a laugh. “You work a diner? That’s fu—freaking _rich_.”

Sondra reaches forward, viper fast, and gets a handful of his hair and pulls. “I’ll drag your ass out of this car right the hell now and—”

He twists around, swearing, trying to get her fingers out of his hair.

Lucy’s jaw is somewhere around her feet, at least metaphorically speaking. She does the only thing she can think of, and slams her hand on the horn. “Cut it _out_!”

Sondra lets go and settles back, stony-faced, while her kids stare at her, wide-eyed.

Sam glares out the window.

Lucy counts to ten under her breath. The world is brittle. She wants to cry.

…

All told, Lucy cries a lot.

“You got a cold or something?” Sondra demands, the first time she brings the twins over to Lucy’s place. She is wearing black skinny jeans and a Hanes white t-shirt, and she looks like a model. “Daisy, honey, don’t touch that. That’s Aunt Lucy’s.”

Something blossoms inside Lucy’s chest. “ _Aunt_ Lucy?”

Sondra ducks her head down, bites her lip. Sondra is so rarely anything close to sheepish that Lucy almost can’t name the expression at first. “Is that OK?”

Lucy links her hands together and gathers them over her heart. “I’ve got to hug you.”

“ _Fine._ ” There’s the Sondra she knows again, prickles out.

Sondra thumps her on the back, twice, and says, “So, what’re you crying about?”

“Just had a fight with my stepmom.”

“Stepmoms.” Sondra grimaces, and deposits the twins on Lucy’s daybed, with an admonishing finger-shake. They round their Bambi-eyes and sit still. “I’ve heard they’re the worst.”

Lucy doesn’t want to write off a whole category of women like that. She shifts from one foot to the other. She has on new ballet flats, and they have that new shoe feeling, very glamorous but also a little painful. “I don’t know. Amy is definitely…a lot.”

“My mom is dead,” Sondra says, unaffectedly, hands in her back pockets. “But she could be a real bitch sometimes.”

Lucy has her window open, and the buttercup-printed curtains rise gently with the breeze. She watches them deflate again. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s she dead, or—for the other thing?” Sondra sits down between the twins and presses the back of her hand to Daisy’s forehead. “Dude, you feel kind of hot. You have a thermometer, Aunt Lucy?”

“Dude.” Ben sounds it out. “Dude-dude-dude.” One of those little-kid laughs that Lucy can’t help but love burbles up in his throat.

“Yeah, I have a thermometer.” She also has three that are for her oven, but those wouldn’t do any good.

…

Lucy turns onto Hudson Street. Everyone’s calmed down, though she’s fighting the realization that there are four children in this car, in one way or another.

_It’s understandable. It’s understandable. She’s been through a lot._

But what about Sam? Lucy sneaks a glance at his profile. He looks pissed _off_ . She floors the gas right past _pity_ , not even pausing.

Parallel parking with an audience is crappy. Lucy does it anyway.

She turns off the car. The cupcakes jangle together.

Now that they’re here, nobody does a damn thing. Sam has not moved in the past ten minutes. He’s folded in on himself, maybe, except that he also doesn’t look any smaller.

“I don’t want—” Sondra’s voice is a little rough. “I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to go in there.”

There are several options, but all of them require Lucy to be in multiple places at once. _This is what you signed up for, honey_ , Amy’s voice grates, and one of these days Lucy is going to cut her off too, _if I’m not speaking to Dad I’m sure as shit done with you—_

But she never is. After all, if she stops talking to Amy, she won’t even know how Dad _is_.

She squeezes her eyes shut because _not right now, not right now_ . “Sondra,” she says, with the school-teacher voice, that doctor voice, _hello, you’re dying, I can’t do this, I’m not cut out for this_ —“Sondra, the kids need lunch. And Sam needs—a shower.”

Sam’s head snaps to look at her, deeply offended, like he’s not the six-foot-twenty dude who forgot his deodorant.

Sondra doesn’t say anything. Sondra is waiting for her to finish.

(Steadiness is the point.)

“I can take them back to my apartment for a little while later, but I have to meet Alessandra at four-thirty. What would you like to do right now?”

Sondra does not meet her eyes in the rearview mirror. Sam cranes his neck and looks back at her, but she stubbornly avoids his gaze too.

“How about chicken nuggets!” Ben exclaims. Ben, of all of them, is practically gleeful and unaffected. Daisy’s eyes have been playing racquet ball this whole time, but she doesn’t say a word.

Sondra takes one, rib-shaking breath. “We’ll have chicken nuggets, bud.” She gets out of the car and strides, warlike—Lucy was right _and_ wrong about that, it’s just that the warrior is not in Sondra’s shoulders but in the way she runs—up the front steps.

It is a place, Lucy knows, that Sondra has never wanted to call home.

“Huh,” Sam says. Not a question, not even snarky. Just says it. Lucy doesn’t look at him.  

…

“You didn’t say he was so…tall.”

Sondra just shrugs. “He’s younger than me.”

Those are not the same things.

Sam comes back in from the bathroom, toweling his hair off. His collar is all rucked up around his neck. There are beads of water on his skin. “Might as well keep this, right?”

Sondra stares at him. “What?”

“The towel. Lavender, remember?”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response, though Lucy’s only guessing because she has no idea what’s going on. It’s like they have an endless array of needles ready for each other, and if that is truly the case she just doesn’t know why Sondra asked her to call Sam in the first place.

What kind of need is this?

…

“I need a toothbrush,” Sam announces, as Lucy is straining to get plates out of the cupboard but resolutely refusing to make eye contact with him.

He keeps his distance this time. _Damn straight_. Her foot left a mark on his stomach.

_He looks good shirtless._

She slams the cabinet shut.

“You forgot to bring a toothbrush?” Sondra demands. She is stretched out on the couch, hair splayed like a crown around her face. She does not open her eyes, but Sam shoots her a glare all the same.

“I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, when your BFF left me thirty voicemails.”

“Feel free to get the hell out,” Sondra shoots back, dead flat.

“There’s a CVS down the block,” Lucy interjects. A muscle is snapping like a pulled cord in Sam’s jaw.

He is silent all the way across the room. When he opens the front door, he shouts, “You’re fucking _lucky_ if I come back, Scully!”

The whole house shakes behind the slam of that door.

Lucy’s shoulders slump down. “Does he mean that?” She shouldn’t be asking questions like a damn child. She shouldn’t be here, but here is where she is.

“Nah. He called me Scully,” Sondra answers, like that explains everything. Then she rolls onto her side, so the curve of her spine is visible through her shirt, and starts to cry.

So does Lucy.


	4. Chapter 4

_“And all the faces come and go, but nothing heals the past.”_ —Nothing Left to Lose, _Kari Kimmel_

Sam pounds pavement.

Two circles round the block before crossing over the slabbed, tar-dribbled parking lot and through the sliding doors. There’s no reason to go running back while he’s still choking on the urge to cram that ratty towel down Sondra’s throat.

 _Hey, stranger._ She’ll never be a stranger, though, not to him. Days like this Sam wishes she was; then he’d have a chance of getting some sort perspective on the shitstorm that plows over everything she touches. Hey, barring perspective, he’d at least get some peace, the one word that’s never entered into Sondra’s personal dictionary and never will.

Productions. Everything has to be a goddamn _production_ with her.

He grabs a toothbrush. He grabs deodorant, a bottle of mouthwash, a razor. Shouldn’t be buying any of this crap—he should be spending his money on gas. He should be headed home.

Five minutes in, or five hours in, Sam stares down at the bottle of men’s multivitamins clenched in his palm.

...Why not.

He paces down aisles like a ghost. A kid, younger than Ben and Daisy, unsteady in her pink-ruffled sneakers, comes within inches of crashing into his legs. Her mother scoops her up with a burst of words Sam doesn’t bother to catch.

A young mom, he thinks. Sondra’s age, maybe a year or two younger. The yoga pants aren’t doing her any favors, but her hair’s washed, her dark circles are circles, not black holes, and if she just caught her husband screwing Julie from work, she’s doing a good job of hiding it.  

 _Decorum_. That’s it. The Yorks have no sense of it, were born without it, the way other people are born colorblind or without a sense of smell. Sam’s not going to pretend he escaped that particular genetic fuck-you, passed down like eye-color and blood-type, like Mom’s ability to hold a grudge and Dad’s habit of putting his fist through walls. At least he knows what’s missing.

In whatever passes for Sondra’s mind these days, he doubts the missing pieces matter.  

The in-store radio plays Bruce Springsteen somehow too low and too loud. The prickle of it lodges in the base of Sam’s skull, keeps him twitchy at the cash register, fingers fumbling with his card, with the slippery plastic bag handles.

_“—let me in, I wanna be your friend, I wanna guard your dreams and visions…”_

He gets out, and he has nowhere to go. Suffocation by towel is out; Sam still doesn’t want to see his sister, talk to her, or come up against the slightest possibility of touching her. So he leans into the wall and, after dumping the bags at his feet, digs his phone out of his pocket. The notification for Tegan’s latest text blinks back at him. One word.

_spill_

He rolls his eyes, though she’s not here to see. It’s known, in the circle of friends they used to share, that Tegan would back over Sondra with a semi and Sondra would do the same for her. Watching each other’s lives unravel is the closest they’ll ever get to bonding.

“You’re both bitter, you know that?” Sam told Tegan once. They were going steady then, unless they weren’t. She’d gotten her fill of Keith and Sondra’s latest blowout and was trying her luck at from-scratch pancakes. (It would’ve been six months before the twins were born, a year before Sondra held Keith down long enough to tie the knot—yeah, they were going steady then. Weren’t they?) “Fucking bitter old hags.”

There was a flake of batter left at corner of his lip, where he’d bit into a pancake still raw in the middle. Tegan reached out to swipe it off.

“Come on,” she said. “Isn’t everyone?”

They’re other notifications, emails he shouldn’t ignore. Something from Sterling about the commission. Something about his lease.

 _It’s Keith,_ he types.

Her answer pops up seconds after he hits enter. _and?_

A damp breeze rustles his bags. The sliding doors whisk back open in time for Sam to catch the opening lines of “She’s the One”, rushed-out, desperate.

Boss must like the Boss.

He stares down at his phone too long.

_come ON_

_i need my fix_

_Makes one of us,_ Sam replies. He makes a bet with himself: back at the apartment, Sondra hasn’t even gotten up off the couch yet.

Tegan waits.

_Keith’s seeing someone else._

He shuts his phone off right away. Sam jams it back in his pocket, bends to grab the bags, and heads across the parking lot.

…

The rain starts when he’s only halfway up the block. It’s the kind of weak, warm drizzle Mom would always say was God spitting. It makes Sam curse and wonder why he bothered taking a shower, when he’s getting another one, totally shitty and completely free, which is at least a welcome distraction from not thinking about how he’s started thinking about Tegan again.

“She’s the kind that sticks with you,” Sondra said after they first met.

A post-it’s slapped on her front door.

 _At my place to pick up a few things._ Lucy’s barbed-wire handwriting snakes to the very edge of the paper. _15, 20 minutes? I’ll be back._

At the very bottom, written a little larger than the rest: _Don’t be a jackass._  

The door’s unlocked. He lets himself in, kicking a single knee-high black boot out of the way. The heaviness to the silence he just broke tells Sam all he needs to know—Sondra hasn’t budged an inch.

The kids she doesn’t mind ignoring are in their bedroom. Only Ben looks up when Sam sticks his head in.

“You’re back!” Half-chewed chicken-nugget pulp crumbles out of his mouth, onto his shirt.

“Watch it,” Sam says. Tacks on the “Bud,” a second too late.

“Aunt Lucy’s not back yet,” Ben says, spewing more chicken-lumpy spit. They’re eating off plates set on stained kitchen towels, both laid out on Ben’s bed. At least Sam assumes it’s Ben bed, unless Sondra’s taken up the cause of gender-neutral children’s bedding. Both sets of sheets are blue, anyway. The other has a hint of lavender to it. Ben’s maybe-bed is draped in navy.

“Did Aunt Lucy say you could eat in here?” Sam asks. “Do me a favor and swallow first.”

Ben gulps. “Uh-huh.”

She must’ve slept with Daisy last night. There’s a depression in the not-quite lavender mattress much bigger than Daisy, who’s currently dunking a finger into her swirl of ketchup and flicking it across Ben’s sheets. There’s also a glasses case set on the nightstand, a pouchy leather one with a picture of thick-framed, hipster glasses printed across the front.

The slow, spitty fleck of rain on the windows swells to a slow, spitty drum.

“Good, uh...you guys stay in here,” Sam says. “Finish your lunch.”

“It’s not lunch.”

“Excuse me?” he blurts. Since last night Sam’s been certain Daisy took a vow of silence as far as he was concerned.  

“There’s no juice.” Both hands sloppy with ketchup, she’s got this look on her face like she’d rather be eating dogshit than talking to him. Same as her mom, but, fuck, coming from a five-year-old it stings. “At lunch we have juice,” Daisy says.  

“Okay,” says Sam. He shuts the door.

He hauls the bags through to the kitchen-cum-living-room and unloads them on the kitchen table. The toothbrush, the mouthwash, the razor, and the deodorant. The men’s multivitamins. The kids’ Flintstone gummies—he knows for a fact Sondra doesn’t have them because she doesn’t believe in vitamins. _I don’t believe in vitamins,_ she’d said; Tegan’d been talking about some kind of herbal supplement her aunt was trying to sell her.  

 _Hey,_ he shot back, _I don’t believe in speeding tickets._

Her dogshit look. _Almost peed myself there, Sam. You should try stand-up._

Once he’s tossed the bags, got the vitamins stowed away in a cabinet and the rest of the stuff dumped on the counter in the bathroom, he turns to the couch.

She’s flopped over on her side, back curled away from him. Hair’s a mess—a knot at the nape of her neck looks as big as Ben’s fist ( _how long has that been there_ ); the hem of her shirt’s ridden up over the first inch or so of her scar, which Sam isn’t thinking about in the same way he’s not thinking about Tegan.

He kicks the couch leg directly under her head. “What’s this shit? Get up.”

Her answer comes razor-thin. “I’m really not feeling this today, Sam.”

“Sondra.” He doesn’t know how to talk to her. He’s never known how to talk to her because nobody knows how to talk to her. “Your kid is flicking ketchup all over the bed. You’ve got some girl whom I’m assuming has a life of her own waiting on you hand and foot.”

“You want to trade places?”

He bends down, his mouth close to her ear, the oily rat’s nest of her hair. “Get your ass up.”

Not a flicker. Sam straightens. He kicks the leg again.

“Keith met her online,” she says.

It’s not that he’s forgotten he should feel bad for her—he does, by the way, bad, sad, mad, and all the rest of whatever mix of complicated yet valid feelings you’re supposed to lug around, check, check, and check—but here’s the thing with Sondra. Either she gets back on her feet, or she wallows. On her feet’s no good for anybody, sure, but wallowing’s no good for her.

And it’s not that Sondra doesn’t know this as well as he does. She just doesn’t give a shit.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” he snaps. “You’re going to need to give me more than that.”

“Not what you came for, huh?” She’s trying for some kind of spark in there, some of her old bite. It’s not coming across. She only sounds tired. Tired and deeply, nastily bitter. “I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, everyone meets online now, okay, whatever, I’m a dumbass.

“She has a tattoo.”

Sondra has two. Sam assumes she’s still aware of this, though who knows.

“This fucking wreath of _roses_ right over her mound. Pretty much the first thing I saw when he jumped up. And you know what the first thing I thought was? You want to know?”

She talks too fast, rushing to get away from it. Sam, plunged into her stream of consciousness, is caught upriver without a paddle.

“He never goes down on me like that. Like, he never does anymore, so I was thinking, I was literally thinking to myself, what about her taste—”

“Thanks, Sondra.”

“ _Christ_ , Sam!” She twists around, scrabbling up to her knees in a shot. “Not everything’s about you!”

“You’ve got kids in here!” He feels the flush rising to the tips of his ears.

(Tegan slumped beside him in front of the TV, turning to tap his cheek with one finger.

“I bet this face gets so red,” she said. “When you’re mad? I bet it looks like a tomato.”

Yeah, they hadn’t been dating for long.)

“Just stop it!” Sam roars. “Stop acting like a fucking teenager!”

Her face hardens. Glaze ice. “Tell me something.”

“Whatever.”

“Tell the truth.”

“You don’t listen, Sondra.”

“Are you going to go and say the same things to Keith?”

There it is. What’s been hanging over his head since he played Lucy’s voicemails. It followed him upstate and now it’s settled in this room, congealing over Sondra’s blotchy skin and runny eyes. _Let’s not do this,_ he’d say, but that implies a partnership that’s never really been there, or at least hasn’t stuck around long enough to ever matter.

“I’m not the one who married him,” Sam says. “So don’t put this on me.”

He knows how that sounds.

Fuck.

He _knows_ how that sounds.

“You’re pacing,” Sondra notes. Resigned, like a doctor listing off lethal but predictable symptoms.

Sam stops. “I’m not.”

A water stain splashes the ceiling right over her head like a lopsided coffee ring. Sam’s eyes keep flicking upwards every few seconds; there’s no way Keith doesn’t have the money to get that painted over.

“You want me to talk to him?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes.

“Come on, I’ll talk to him if you want me—”

“ _You’re_ supposed to want to talk to him!” Sondra almost jumps off the couch, then catches herself, rolling her eyes like she should’ve suspected this was his plan all along. She drops back down, works her ass as far back into the corner between couch armrest and back as it’ll go, and crosses her legs.

“Don’t do it if you don’t want to,” she snaps. “What’s the point?”

He was maybe too quick to toss the death by bath towel idea. Sam feels his hands balling to fists and tries to work one loose, rubbing his thumb against the side of his ring finger until he can’t stand the feeling anymore. “You’re ridiculous.”

Sondra scratches at her greasy roots. “You said I was good for him.”

 _Years ago,_ Sam could say, and almost does. There’s so much to say, though, and none of it feels worth saying.

 _Don’t be a jackass._ Lucy’s voice pinpricks through his head, blue ballpoint on pink paper; he glances over at the counter like he’ll find her there. Trying to boost herself up again. This tiny, dumpy kid with the bowtie-splattered hem of her skirt brushing the soft backs of her knees...and then he remembers the way she laid on the horn and thinks Lucy’s started to get an idea of what she’s stepped into.

“Why do you want me here?”

His sister shrugs.

Sam tries a different tack. “Did you break his nose?” Lucy only said it was bloody. Lucy also seems like the type to always say the glass is half full. “Is Keith going to press charges?”

She shrugs again.

 _Why do you want me here?_ The fact that he has to ask pisses Sam off more than the fact that Sondra’s refusing to answer—playing the coy bullshit card’s her thing. She likes to watch you squirm. But it should be obvious: he drives up for a couple days, gets in a few good swings at Keith, comforts his broken-hearted sister. Leaves. Neither of them is really the comforting type, so here he is, stuck playing twenty questions.

It’ll be either a heart attack or an aneurysm that does him in. “Get up,” Sam repeats.

She shakes her head.

He’s seeing just enough red to blow right past the obvious: this turning out exactly like their standoffs over the top bunk, or the La-Z-Boy, or the remote. Lunging closer, he wraps both arms around Sondra’s waist and does his level best to haul her off himself.

She shrieks. “Stop it!” Pounds on his back with one hand, rakes through his hair with the other, clawing right at the roots of his hair and yanking. Then, once he’s finally heaved her up, Sondra collapses, letting her legs go limp-noodle. Sam stumbles; it almost tips them both back onto the couch.

“Asshole!” She’s sagging in his arms, this hysterical edge to her voice that might be either laughter or tears and he tells himself he doesn’t care. Since he doesn’t. Sondra thumps her forehead against Sam’s chest. “You’re supposed to let me _grieve_.”

“So do it at the kitchen table,” Sam snaps. He moves to let her go. She makes no move to settle on her feet.

“Hey, Scully?”

Sondra rams his collarbone again. Sam almost chokes.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Apparently she isn’t. He grits his teeth and shuffles around. Sam starts to plod forward, Sondra’s feet knocking against his like a puppet’s, her shoulders shaking. He stops, but his shirt’s not getting damp so he figures she’s either laughing or faking it.

“I thought you lost the baby weight,” he grunts.

“In only five years? Who am I, Wonder Woman?”

Sam snorts—you can always count on her to keep the sense of humor, if nothing else—right before Sondra hooks one foot around his ankle. He goes down, she goes down; both flailing at each other like toddlers. Sam’s chin all but cracks on the peeling linoleum. Sondra squawks. The apartment shakes.   

“Jesus Christ!”

“Move your frigging—”

“What the hell’s wrong—”

“Mommy?”

In the time it takes regret, slippery and cold, to settle in, then diffuse through, his gut, Sondra’s already sat up, sparing a second to elbow Sam’s ribs as hard as she can.

“It’s okay,” she chirps, aggressively bright. “Mommy’s just being stupid.”

“Stupid?” Ben echoes the question, uncertain, like it’s never an adjective he’s heard applied to his mom before—Sam finds this unlikely.

“Oh yeah, dude. So stupid.” Sondra aims a kick at Sam’s knee. “I just tripped over my own feet. Can you believe that? Your uncle Sam—” Another kick. “—was trying to help me up, and then he tripped over _my_ feet!”

The twins are standing in the doorway to the hall, bunched together in a jumpy-looking knot. Crumbs of nugget-coating fleck Ben’s shirt. Daisy’s is smeared with ketchup, and she’s got the hem crumpled in one fist and tugged up over her belly; a tick Sam recognizes from last night.

Beside him, Sondra sighs. “Daisy-baby, pull your shirt down.”

She gets to her feet, a little unsteady and wincing, and hurries to bend over her kids. Hands to their hair, their shoulders, she’s spitting out one sentence after the other like they’ve been pre-programmed, strings of reassurances they all know mean nothing. But the kids play along, and, after a minute, Sam does too, clambering back to his feet and slumping over. He has no idea what to say, nothing to add, but it turns out he doesn’t need it—Ben detaches from the tight huddle and just...sort of butts his head against Sam’s leg, nuzzling his jeans like a cat. It’s a move Sam recognizes from younger kids (Tegan’s cousin has a two-year-old). Hesitantly, he drops a hand down, ruffles the soft stubble of Ben’s hair.

Sondra looks over at him. They’re both faking this, Sam knows, but all the same he catches it. In her eyes. In her hands.  These kids are the only people she’s really cared about today. Besides herself.

“Her name’s Jenna,” she says. Quietly.

Sam says, “I’m sorry.”

Outside, a car engine gutters to a stop.

Ben’s broken away from Sam in a flash, darted right out the door he knows—he knows he locked it. Sondra’s face is sharpening into a glare— “The latch is crap,” she grumbles like it’s Sam’s fault. “You’ve got to hip check that door or it won’t actually shut.”—until Ben’s next report reaches them loud and clear.

“Daddy!” He races back in through the hallway. “Daddy’s here!”

The look on Sondra’s face is full of everything but grief. “He’s not coming inside,” she says. A fact and nothing else.

All right.

All right.

_This is what you came for._

_All right?_

Sam heads for the door. “What do you want me to do?”


	5. Chapter 5

_“I never thought twice in life / But it's time I realize / Loving you ain't easy / But I'm not gonna leave ya.”_ _—_ Fashion, _The Royal Concept_

Sam reaches the six-foot mark the summer after he turns fifteen. This should be no surprise; his father is tall and his uncles are tall—

It still surprises him.

By seventeen, he is as tall as he’s going to get. Six-foot-three, and if he’s still shaving his chin in patches, that’s not the kind of thing people notice anymore.

When he’s not sketching, or running, or ruining his eardrums with death-music (that last description is Mom’s), he’s…not doing much of anything.

Dad hauls him up by the collar one day, slams shoulders to wall and tells him he’s going to get his ass kicked if he doesn’t do something about getting a job.

Sam has two options: tell his dad to fuck off and take that ass-kicking for a test-drive, or get a job.

He chooses the latter.

They are living about fifteen miles from Wilmington, Delaware. Their town is not a prosperous one. They won’t stay here long, Sondra observes, sneering.

Actually, they do.

Sam gets a job in the sports supply store, working the check-out. A blond guy, all confidence and too-snug t-shirts, shows him the ropes.

“Y’know,” Sam says one day, because he’s stupid, he’s always been stupid, “You should meet my sister.”

…

“Hey, Sam.”

Keith is Sondra’s age, but Sam finds that they look older in different ways. For Sondra it is those dark shadows and the way her mouth seems permanently pulled and wry.

As for Keith, he’s kept his physique well enough, but his face seems flatter, redder. It’s the drinking. Keith has always been a three-beers-a-day guy.

Used to sneak them to Sam, actually. He used to sneak a lot of stuff to Sam.

“Keith.”

“Daddy!” Ben interjects, all glee and abandon and holy  _ shit _ , Sondra wouldn’t want this, but Keith’s just as related to the kid as she is. Ben wraps his arms around Keith’s waist and just sort of  _ stays there _ , barnacle-like.

“Hey, buddy. How’s it going?” Right when Sam thinks how it’s truly, deeply unfair that Keith, cheating asshole that he is, is still a better father than some—Keith adds, “How’s your Mom?”

“She says she’s stupid,” Ben divulges, all stage-whispery. “She’s—”

“Ben,” Sam cuts in. He’s not protecting Sondra. That’s not what this is about. Sondra has never accepted protection from anyone. She likes to douse her world in gasoline and warm her hands over the flames that follow.

A sudden memory hurls itself to Sam’s mind: Sondra, meeting Keith, jeans low on her pale hips, hacked-off t-shirt a deceptively soft shade of pink. And Sam, gawky and over-eager, offering her up on a silver platter to the cool guy at work, thinking that there’s no going back. Thinking that this  _ isn’t just another guy who’s going to screw his sister, this is something else— _

Hell, why did he do it?

What did he think was going to happen?

Keith must see some sort of storm cloud settling on Sam’s brow, though, because he doesn’t try to play out the kid card. “Yeah, Benny. Go inside. Go see Mom.”

Maybe Sondra’s watching from the window. Maybe she’s not. Sam imagines her with her back to the door and a kitchen knife in her hands. Sondra has always just needed the right excuse to turn homicidal. He would heave a sigh, but Keith is staring him down quizzically.

“I can’t believe she called you.”

Like Keith has any  _ fucking right _ —

He’s not protecting Sondra. That’s not what this is about. Sam waits until the door bangs shut behind Ben, and then says, “I can’t believe you banged a chick from the Internet.”

“Jes—” Keith shakes his head. “It was Tinder. Not  _ Craigslist _ .”

“Does that make it better?”

“Sondra’s a lot to handle,” Keith says, leaning in like he used to do when Sam was seventeen, when he trusted Keith to impart life’s greatest secrets and truths or some such shit. “And between me and you, dude, she’s a little saggier than she used to be, y’know—”

Sam has been Sondra’s brother long enough to know that  _ seeing red _ is a real thing, but it always knocks him off his feet a little all the same.

Blurrily, he can see Keith setting his thick shoulders, even getting ready to swing too, and yeah, that’s probably because Sam is halfway into a lunge for his throat—

“No.”

It’s Lucy.

It’s Lucy, and Sam doesn’t do whatever he’s going to do next.

She is between them, arms folded over her chest, chin tilted up. Defiance, maybe, or just the fact that she’s short.

She’s looking at Keith.

The look on her face is not the girl who was white-knuckling the drive to the police station, nor is it the girl who horse-kicked him in the stomach. She  _ might _ be the girl who yelled at him in the yellow light of the bathroom, while Ben sloshed gleefully around in his sheets, but that doesn’t feel quite right either.

_ Huh _ . Apparently Lucy hates Keith more than she hates Sam. Which, objectively is totally fair, but—

Sam doesn’t bother finishing the thought. Maybe he can’t.

“What are you doing here?” Keith demands, apparently leaving all thoughts of having a brother-in-law brawl off the table for a moment.

“What are  _ you _ doing here?” Lucy slashes back, cold with fury.

Keith’s eyes narrow. His eyes are a little bloodshot, maybe perpetually. There’s a blur to the whites. Three beers a day, plus whatever else he’s done or is doing, will accomplish that. He makes up his mind. Sam recognizes that twitch in his jaw. “I’m here to talk to Sondra.”

_ Oh,  _ hell _ no, _ Sam says in his head, but he doesn’t even have to say it aloud (and isn’t he…not protecting Sondra? Or something?) because Lucy has marched firmly past Keith, past Sam, and is now standing in the doorway.

Keith rolls his eyes, tips his head back. Like this day is hard for  _ him _ . “Man, don’t make this worse than it has to be.”

“If you try to get past me,” Lucy says, voice still as smooth and flat as Olympic ice or some shit—“ _ I’ll _ call the cops.” Sam takes her in, almost for the first time. She has a backpack on. She’s wearing skinny jeans and a flowy tunic top the color of a ripe cantaloupe. She is taller than both of them, because she is standing on the steps.

“This is my house.” Keith’s fair eyebrows crawling upwards. Sam looks at that house. He will never get an explanation, he thinks, of where it all began to go wrong. Not financially, at least. That is somehow the last worry on any of their minds.

Behind the frowning brownstone façade, Sondra is—

Sondra. Sondra is her own shell. Now she’s just hiding inside another one.

Lucy hasn’t blinked in probably a full minute. “I’ll say you tried to grope me.”

Sam watches as something uglier twists its way out of Keith. Maybe it was there all along. Sam remembers seventeen, how growing up in some ways meant that he could finally forget about others; put them away for a while, as though he would ever take any kind of future off that particular shelf again.

(Maybe he’s never known Keith at all.)

“Seriously?” Keith rocks his chin up and down, a onceover made flat and baldly cynical. “Like I’d be interested in a little—pork dumpling like you?”

That does it.

His back is to the house. Sam slides right into the best stance for punching and barely even has to think about it. In less than two seconds, Keith will be missing his front teeth. There are some things you can’t come back from, and being a racist asshole to a friend of the wife you cheated on is one of them.

The punch doesn’t land.

Doesn’t even—well, it happens like this. Sam feels his left hand tugged backward, and realizes, like the way a good line of poetry hits  _ after  _ it’s been read, that Lucy’s fingers are laced through his.

“Nope,” she says, under her breath, just for him to hear. “Not worth it.”

He wants this. Seventeen-year-old Sam, longing for a friend who isn’t just looking to screw his sister, wants revenge against the guy who broke her heart. ( _ His fault _ .)

Nineteen-year-old Sam is fucked-up and staring at the ceiling, and Keith’s the one who’s rolling the next joint. ( _ Somehow, still his fault. _ )

Twenty-two-year-old Sam is telling himself that Sondra and Keith are going to last, because the alternative is far too awful for anyone to choose.

( _ The alternative is staring him in the face _ .)

“Don’t let me see you again,” Sam says. It sounds like his father’s voice, coming out of his mouth, and this is a sacrifice that Sondra won’t appreciate, because Sondra has never understood the bone-saw grating of those particular humiliations. “You’ll leave her alone, or I swear to fucking—”

Keith is already raising one hand. “Whatever, man. Fuck you. Fuck her.” Sam almost expects him to say,  _ fuck the kids _ , which, if that happens, Lucy won’t be able to hold him back.

But even Keith apparently has his limits. He turns, a sharp turn. Almost military. Stalks back to his car.

It’s the nicest one on the block.

Sam watches him go. Watches some kind of messed-up hero die even though it was one he’d practically forgotten.

Lucy is still holding his hand.

Sam does the wrong thing. He looks down.

Her hand is a lot smaller than his. Nails clean and short. Unpolished. Which is not expected. He’s so used to Tegan’s talons, if only for the marks they leave.

Lucy looks down, too, and lets go like she’s been burned.

They’re facing each other, now. Well, sort of. She had come down the steps to stop him from punching Keith so now they’re back to their typical stand-off distance of her having to bend her neck way back to look him in the eyes.

She looks…pissed. “That was the wrong way to handle it.”

“What?”

“Both of us.” Lucy shakes her head. “Adding more anger to this situation isn’t what it needs.”

Considering that he didn’t even throw any actual punches, Sam is not sure what the hell that is supposed to mean. He shuts his mouth, not caring if it makes him look sullen.

Lucy heaves out a long, shuddering sigh. Her shoulders are trembling a little.

_ Compassion _ . He should be trying for it, at least. “You OK?”

Her face doesn’t soften so much as it opens, a little. Her lips part. “Uh, I’m…I’m fine. Let’s go check on Sondra.”

He doesn’t want to go back into that—place. It is like all the places he grew up rolled into one cramped prison cell. The never-clean carpets and the stale food smell because the kids insist on eating everywhere and—

He didn’t even pick up his own damn pizza boxes in New York. He remembers that.

Lucy, once again, has gone up the steps ahead of him. Lucy, unlike any of them, is a soldier.

And Sam is just a guy who didn’t throw a punch, twice, so he follows her.

…

Sondra is not on the couch.

She is in the bathroom with the door locked. Sam stands in front of the door, noting the peeling laminate, and raps on it with the curled side of his palm. “He’s gone.”

Sondra doesn’t answer. Sam listens to her retch, cough, and then flip the fan on. It’s that last sound that shuts him out.

The shower rushes on.

Sam turns around. Lucy is right behind him.

“Whoa,” he says, because they’ve almost smacked into each other. Sam is staring down her top, quite by accident, and Lucy waves a hand in front of his face.

“Eyes up, dumbass.”

He flushes. He really hadn’t meant to—never mind. “Sor—what, are you gonna call the cops on me?”

Lucy turns her back on him. She marches down the narrow hallway and knocks, with her knuckles, on the twins’ door. “Ben? Daisy?”

They answer something—one of them does, probably Ben—but Sam can’t make it out. “OK,” Lucy says. “May I come in?”

As polite as if she isn’t surrounded by a cardboard-and-carpet hell. Sam flinches. Lucy opens the twins’ door.

“Wow!” she says, with a brightness that is not brittle like Sondra’s brightness. “Lunch must have been yummy! Let’s get these sheets off.”

“Lunch,” Sam hears Daisy say, distinctly, “Has juice.”

“You’re so right,” Lucy answers. Then she yells, “Hey, Sam? Can we get a couple of cups of juice out there?”

This girl is too much. “What?”

“On the table is fine. Thanks.”

There is a version of Sam that is animatedly explaining the wrist technique of raised acrylic dabs under hanging lamps that come as close as a Manhattan interior can to natural light, twenty-four hours a day. There is a version of Sam waking up next to Tegan, and there is a version of Sam floating sky-high because he’s always been an idiot even when the world was finally, finally at his fingertips.

All of those Sams are folded, tattered at the edges, and stuffed away.

He stalks off to get two cups of juice.

…

Thirty minutes of Lucy set loose on the place does wonders.

(Thirty minutes is also the amount of time Sondra spends in the shower.)

Of course, Lucy can’t tear up the burgundy shag carpet and unstain the sagging couch, but she bundles dirty laundry into a drawstring bag, wipes down every wipeable surface, and has the twins quiet and happy with their juice for a surprisingly long time.

(To be fair, Sam got them the juice.)

Sondra cracks open the bathroom door, letting out a wall of steam.

Sam wants to crack a window, but then Sondra will be pissed at him. Reason? None.

He stares sourly into space.

Only, space turns out to contain two accusatory pairs of eyes.

“It’ll stick like that,” Ben observes.

Sam jolts a bit. “What will?”

Daisy tips back her cup of juice and offers not a word. The vow of silence must be back in style.

“Your  _ face _ ,” Ben explains, demonstrating an elaborate frown of his own.

Lucy is putting away dishes. Sam thinks she makes a small, amused sniff.

Sam dearly longs to flip her off, but there are children present, blah-blah-blah. “You need help?”

“Nah. Thanks.” She might as well have shouted  _ not from you, loser _ , at the top of her voice.

“You didn’t have to do this.”

_ Sondra _ .

She’s wearing a loose, dark t-shirt (and a bra,  _ thankfully _ , because you never know what to expect from Sondra) and leggings. Her feet are bare. The toes of her right foot are bruised purple straight-across.

Sam is expressly not going to ask.

Lucy slides a stack of blue-flowered plates into a cabinet and shuts it. “It’s all good, Bee.”

Sam watches Sondra’s face smooth out a little. “Thanks,” she says, very quietly, in the same moment, he blurts out, “ _ Bee _ ?”

“Short for  _ bitch _ ,” Daisy announces, crystal-clear and grim-eyed.

Lucy turns scarlet. “No! Daisy! Honey, no! That’s a bad word! And no, it’s not short for—it’s your Mom’s middle name. That’s all.”

Sondra is  _ laughing _ . Doubled over, a little hysterical. But laughing.

(And it’s true, her middle name is just  _ B _ , one letter, because their parents couldn’t come to a goddamn  _ agreement _ about  _ Bethany _ or  _ Beatrice _ .)

…

It gets a little better after that. Four-thirty and Lucy leaving to meet Alessandra (whoever the hell  _ that _ is) hangs over their heads, but they settle down with Sondra on the couch, the twins curled up next to her and Sam on the floor (of course).

Lucy in the beat-up rocking chair. Sam recognizes that chair.

It was Mom’s.

He didn’t stick around, after the funeral, to see who got what. Didn’t even stay for the whole—

_ Nope, not going there _ .

They don’t talk about Keith. They talk about the Kardashians, or at least, Sondra does, and then Lucy gently steers the conversation back to kid-friendlier topics. Sam doesn’t say much.

Ben keeps staring at him. Placid curiosity, nothing more, but Sam can feel the stare burrowing into the back of his neck.

“Uncle Sam needs a haircut,” he says at last, and Sondra snorts with laughter.

“That’s not likely to happen.”

“Why?”

If Sam could roll his eyes all the way back in his head, he would.

“He’s always kept it long.” Sondra is nudging his shoulder with her toes, talking like he isn’t there. “Except when he was like—what, thirteen, Sam?—and Dad held him down and buzzed it off, Marine-style. You did  _ not _ have the ears for that look, let me tell you.”

Sam can feel those same ears growing red at that hateful memory, but he’s shocked out of it by the fact that Lucy’s lips have folded together in some kind of… _ sympathetic _ …frown.

“That really sucks,” she says, and she sounds sincere. “I’m sorry.”

Sondra’s pointed bullet-gaze is flashing between them. Sam shrugs. “It was a long time ago. I was a punk kid.”

“You’re still a punk kid,” is Sondra’s helpful contribution.

“I’m twenty-seven!” Which is, he belatedly realizes, a very punk kid thing to say. Snapping back one’s age with petty inflection never won any awards for maturity.

“See!” Lucy flicks a finger in his direction, sounding triumphant. “Practically the same age.”

She can’t be his age. She really can’t. She looks like she’s barely out of college. He rolls his eyes and doesn’t acknowledge this. Acknowledging that Lucy is right about  _ anything _ seems like it would be a very dangerous road to start down.

He changes the subject. Someone has to. “Who’s Alessandra?”

Lucy skewers him with a skeptical glance. “How do you know about Alessandra?”

“You mentioned her, before. Four-thirty.” He’s being kebabbed by the laser-eyes of two women now. “Sorry for keeping track of whatever the he—heck the plan is.”

Lucy seems to be considering a smile, but she answers without one. “Alessandra is my boss. She’s a pastry chef.”

“You’re a pastry chef?”

“Learning.”

“Her cupcakes are mind-blowing,” Sondra puts in, resting her elbow on the edge of the couch and her temple against her knuckles. Her hair is spiraling wetly over her shoulders. “Seriously. It’s art.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sam says, and  _ wow _ , that sounded super dick-ish. “I mean—”

“Nope!” Lucy waves a hand.  _ There’s _ the brittle edge to her brightness, the one that was missing before. “It’s fine. I hear it all the time.”


	6. Chapter 6

  _“But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot / I guess not.”—_ Kids, _MGMT_

She regrets it as soon as his hand tightens around hers. Sam’s hands are as huge as the rest of him, which means that Lucy, for one, doesn’t notice their hugeness specifically until her fingers are almost lost between his. And Lucy doesn’t have small fingers. Short, yes—they’re what she calls farmhand’s fingers. Wide and stubby, but they get the job done.

“Not worth it,” she squeaks, voice so sick and so small she feels the blush burning already, wishes the sidewalk could swallow her whole and what the hell is she trying to do, exactly? How the hell is this going to help?

His knuckles are a continent of their own, dusted with dark hairs. His left index nail, yellowed and torn down to the quick, dwarfs her thumbnail. Easily. When Sam’s fingers clench and squeeze—Lucy can only hope he’s imagining throttling the living daylights out of Keith, like she is—it’s hard enough to press the nails white.

“Don’t let me see you again,” he says, and when Keith storms off to the car that’s always been one of the approximately three things Lucy ever liked about him (It’s a cherry-red Audi, okay?), his fucking stupid shoulders up to his fucking stupid ears like he’s the victim, like they’re the bullies and this is a _playground_ , his fucking stupid pork dumpling bit on a loop through her head, she guesses she should feel triumphant, or at least blown away that it actually worked. That’s the problem, though. It shouldn’t have worked.

Sam should have gone after him.

She should have gone after him.

Pork dumpling. Like he was being so fucking clever. Except in his own way he was; Keith always knows what will get a person, hook them right through the gut. Lucy knows Sondra, and Sondra knows that better than anyone else.

She wants to pop his eyeballs out with her thumbs. Instead she turns away, mouths something about not needing more anger, something Sam’s twisted expression shows her he believes as much as she does.

Amy would be proud.

“You OK?”

He has to know she’s not. God, Lucy’s almost shaking, the thought of going back into the apartment coming on like a panic attack. She loves Sondra. She loves Ben and Daisy. (Sam makes her feel small and ineffectual and stupid, but nowhere near as much as Keith just did; Lucy will take what she can get.) If she goes back in there, she won’t be able to breathe.

They’re not her family. Not really. This isn’t her home.

Lucy wants to go home.

Sam’s brow furrows.

“I’m fine.”

 _Bullshit,_ she’s sure he’s thinking. He doesn’t answer at all.

…

Lucy doesn’t replay the moment she took his hand, or the moment she dropped it, a billion times over.

Really. She doesn’t.

Anyway, it’s enough to drown out the Keith loop, at least temporarily. That’s an improvement until it isn’t—the problem with Sam, which she’s just starting to notice, (it’s more obvious now that they aren’t the only two adults in the apartment) is he’s a follower. As in, wherever you go, there he is. Loading the dishwasher in the kitchen? Sam’s barely five feet away, all right angles on the couch. Talking to Sondra as the two of you, on hands and knees, scan the carpet in the twins’ room for ketchup stains? Sam’s sure to lurk in the doorway, hands jammed into his pockets, silent. Letting the awkwardness suffocate all three of you bit by bit.

(There are at least six stains, by the way. “Kid must think she’s the next Seurat,” Sondra grumbles, then, after a silent beat, asks without turning, “What? Did I get it wrong?”

“It’s Pollock,” Sam answers, his voice a strange mix of annoyance and patience that, for no good reason, starts Lucy worrying about the size of her ass and the size of her jeans. “Seurat’s the points, Pollock’s the drips.”

He hangs on to her every word, Lucy realizes. Sondra’s. Sullenly, but being around the two of them is like being around Ben and Daisy; roped halfway into a conversation you’ve just caught the tail end of.)

Truth be told, half of her is hoping he’ll be long gone by the time she makes it back from Alessandra’s. But come one in the morning she’s shuffling through to the kitchen, a half-dozen leftover pastries (apple scones, mostly) crumpled under her arm in a brown paper bag, and he’s back on the freshly made up couch, pale, lopsided feet stuck straight over the side, Ben tangled in the covers beside him.

Two sets of snores rumble over the hum of the fridge as Lucy cracks the door. She pushes at the bottle of limeade to make room for the scones on the top shelf, which knocks a jar of salsa out of—

_Shit._

“Who’s there?”

It rings out rough and way too loud; Lucy’s heart stutters in her chest. “It’s me,” she answers, sounding exactly like she used to the handful of times she broke curfew back in high school and hating herself for it.

“Lucy?” Sam’s sitting up now, one hand on Ben’s shoulder to keep him from popping up, too. Light from the fridge casts his skin the color of margarine.

“Just knocked something over.” She’s already hurried to the sink and back, a wet washcloth dripping in her hand. The jar hasn’t shattered, luckily, but the lid’s popped off, splattering the floor. Lucy wipes up chunks of pepper and onion and glops of tomato pulp, knees aching and ankles wobbling the longer she crouches down, her work shirt, untucked and tacky with sweat, pasted to the folds of her back.

Sam blinks down at the mess, face slab-blank, tired, and stupid.

“What were you planning for breakfast?” she whispers after a minute. Lucy is bone-tired, creaking, her smile so forced it’s a category of its own, but for crying out loud, she held his hand. They’ve slept under the same roof already; he might be an elitist, pedantic ass with anger issues, but they’re familiar, and they can be the kind of civil that won’t turn this moment into one of the most awkward of her life. “Hope it wasn’t huevos rancheros.”

He blinks some more. One of his hands still rests on Ben’s shoulder; it moves down, absently, to rub along his nephew’s back.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he finally says.

Her left knee twinges. Lucy teeters a second longer, then gives up and sits, butt to the peeling linoleum, the slop around her turning everything cold, spicy, slippery.

Maybe she isn’t as good at talking to people as some of them have let her think. Deep breath. It shudders; God, she just wants to go home, to her own bed and her own kitchen, to peace and quiet, to her own problems, which aren’t getting any smaller, by the way, while she’s sitting here, putting up with this shit—

Nope. No way. He’s not seeing her cry. Again.

Another breath.

Another.

“I—” One a.m. brain scrabbling for a comeback; Lucy lets it take over, runs with it. “—I really don’t like you, Sam,” she hears. “Really. I really don’t.”

Something in his face jerks. Maybe it’s a tick. Maybe she’s wiped-out tired and seeing things. “No,” he shoots back, sharp as a curse, “What I meant—”

The salsa’s gone, or mostly gone. She heaves herself up. “I’m tired, you’re tired. Let’s not do this.”

First Keith. Now him.

Lucy is done with assholes.

…

The twins’ room still smells like OxiClean. The wet rasp of Sondra’s breathing pulls Lucy over to the side of Daisy’s bed; all she wants now is to slide in with them, everyone curled up close like it’s a slumber party.

Sure. The bed’s a twin. No one’s going to thank her lard ass for trying to squeeze in. Instead, Lucy sags into Ben’s empty bed, her breath coming a little too fast when she muffles it in the pillow, her eyes hot and grainy.

She wants to kill Keith, but the next time she sees him she’ll probably just crawl under a table and cry. And she’ll need to get out of the house early, probably before even Sondra’s really awake. Otherwise it’ll be the same with Sam.

 _You shouldn’t be here_ , like she wasn’t here for Sondra all the months and months and months and the year, the whole goddamn _year_ she and Keith were falling apart. Like he was, like he’s done anything since he came but air his own crap and kick his sister’s to the curb, like Sam’s crap is something Lucy ever wanted to see. Like he has the right to tell her she’s not wanted—like what he wants matters. Bull. Bull-fucking-shit, it matters.

Except then she remembers how his face changed five minutes ago, twitching into something stumbling and almost sorry. She remembers how, hours ago, Sam shrugged off the prod of his sister’s toes without a word, the move down to an instinct, like one of those big-boned Clydesdales shaking off flies. His hand on Ben’s back, his fingers fumbling with the buckles of Ben’s car seat; his fingers curled in a fist, his fingers laced through hers...and she’s not going to think about that, and it’s okay, because come tomorrow, the day after at the latest, Sam will be gone, back to New York and his brushes and galleries, and nothing he said to her—

(nothing she said to him)

—will ever matter again to either of them.   


	7. Chapter 7

_ “The future’s in our hands / and we will / never be the same again.” - _ Things We Lost in the Fire,  _ Bastille _

“Where do your parents live?” Tegan asked, once, seven years ago—a time before Sam knew every one of her freckles and the way she looked when she lied.

(Tegan looks the same as always when she lies, except that her smile goes a little crooked on one side.)

“Florida,” Sam had answered, the word matching in shortness the clatter of the bowls he set down.

Bowls of ramen. They were college students, after all.

(Not for long. But that’s another story.)

He didn’t know how to explain, then, how Florida seemed the worst possible option for his parents. He hadn’t seen where they lived— _ speaking terms _ already being an open question—but he could imagine it. An upscale condo, bought with the money they hadn’t always had.

His dad growing thick and soft around the middle in a flamingo-printed shirt. His dad, the male nurse with the military haircut and the gaze of steel.

And mom, doing group bingo and dodging alligators instead of writing.

To think of them  _ gone _ was painful enough; to think of them old and ridiculous was somehow much worse.

Not that Florida gave Mom very much, for very long.

…

Last Sam heard, Dad was living in Virginia Beach.

He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about Dad right now. Maybe because he’s in the limbo of decision-making that always calls into comparison all the decisions that have gone before.

Sam is driving to the city.

That’s all he knows right now.

…

His apartment is just like he left it. Grime between the floorboards; Tegan appearing behind him, silent and catlike and just—watching him, apparently.

At least she’s fully clothed this time. “Thought you were never coming back,” she says, and it’s a twisted echo of every look Sondra’s given him in silence for the past week.

Because yes, a week. A week, and then he said,  _ I have to go _ , and—

“Needed to sort some shit out,” he says.

Tegan is familiar. Every curve, every green fleck in her eyes. If things go a certain way, he’s sure he’ll find every freckle unchanged, too.  

“How’s Sondra?”

He turns away from the curios blade of her smile and starts hunting through the battered desk-drawers. His lease is in here somewhere.

“Sondra’s fine.”

“Oh, you’re going to play coy now? Like you haven’t been texting me all weak about her batshit antics?”

He wheels around, lease in hand. “I texted you about it once. That’s not the same as…whatever.” He has forgotten, in a week, how cleverly Tegan will slip into every crack, every weakness. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. Kind of weird that you just showed up here at the same time as me.”

“Leland told me you were back today.”

Great. His ex is talking to his boss now. Well, “boss.” Sam has always used the term loosely; thus his inability to hold down much in the way of a career.

“Leland has a big mouth,” is all Sam says, in the moment, because the moment is all there is. He gets the lease and then he starts hunting through for clothes. In doing so, the decision inches closer.

…

“You’re coming back, right?”

Ben had asked.

Of course it was Ben, who has been Sam’s one and only champion upstate. Practically from the first moment, but also in the wake of Keith leaving and the first fragile moments of bonding that sought to web over that gaping goodbye.

Ben trusts Sam.

And a kid should trust his uncle, right? Mother’s brother, and all that.

Only, it is not that simple. Sam stood and stared down at the stocky, compact,  _ confident _ kid, who apparently was just sucking up the fact that his life had collapsed.

_ He’s a kid, stupid _ , Lucy’s voice pointed out. It hadn’t even taken a week for Lucy to take over Sam’s internal self-flagellation processes.  _ He doesn’t know his life collapsed. _

The question hung in the air between Ben and Sam, and even more between Sam and Sondra, who was standing at the sink and pretending not to listen.

…

“I’ll come with you to the studio.”

Tegan can be very accommodating when she wants to be. Sam tries to fit his brain back into weeks punctuated by swanky showings, penny-and-dime grocery counting, and blacked-out endings. It’s a whole lot of whiplash, and he finds that it  _ doesn’t _ fit anymore. It just—

“If you want,” he says, because he thinks that he knows what he’s going to do, and Tegan doesn’t figure into it.

Tegan, of course, is not satisfied with even the barest hint of that. She links her arm possessively around his as they cross acres of sidewalk. He can smell her perfume; can taste it, like he has so many times before.

(He made Lucy laugh yesterday.)

A beat passes. A heartbeat.

He doesn’t know why this, too, hangs in the air like dust motes and sunlight. It’s not like Lucy is anything more than the voice in his head and the thorn in his side, just another reason why the answer to Ben’s question should be  _ no _ .

A week hadn’t done much between them, not since the midnight salsa incident and all sorts of brusque encounters after that. Lucy is a support to the parts of Sondra that Sam hasn’t even had the benefit of knowing.

Who knew that “best behavior” was even something Sondra  _ contained _ .

“Thinking, huh?” Tegan jabs him in the ribs with a pointed nail. The studio is nearby; one of the reason Sam was lucky to get the lease he did.  _ Was, was, was _ . “Seems like big sis did a number on you, as always.”

If he was a loyal brother, he’d shout some defense of Sondra right about now. But Sam is much more in pieces now than he is any one thing.

…

“I just got some stuff to do, bud.”

Ben blinked steadily at that answer. It was the first time Sam saw any resemblance to Sondra; the flat stare she adopted when she wasn’t accepting reality. “What stuff?”

“Grown-up stuff.” He knew that Sondra would bite his head for being condescending, even to her almost-toddler, so he amended, “For my job. I…paint.”

Ben chewed on his mashed thumbnail. “Pictures? Mommy has some. Uncle Sam’s pictures. Cool.”

Sam straightened up. He’d had his hands clamped on his knees, looking Ben in the eyes, like that was easier. Sondra snapped her head back around, caught in the moment of listening.

Sam knew he should care.

He just didn’t know how much.

…

“I’ll be back for the June exhibit,” Sam hears his voice say. Hears it leave his mouth, calm and deep and articulate, the voice that came in starts and stops all through his teenage years. The voice that still breaks when he yells. “And I’ll be available digitally.”

Leland arches a very manicured eyebrow. “Family troubles?  Bitch, please. She—” He sketches a circle in the air with his finger, aimed at Tegan’s stomach—“Does not look pregnant.”

“His sister just went to jail,” Tegan spills, teeth nipping at her lower lip in ill-concealed mirth.

“God,” Leland exhales. Leland is a proud atheist; Sam is not sure who or what he is invoking.  

“Can you live with this?”

Leland stares at the ceiling, as though Sam has personally, mortally offended me. Finally, Leland relents, both in spirit and in his ceiling-gazing. “Fine. I’ll need you to send me a couple pieces prior to that, too.”

“I can make it work,” Sam says. Which is so wholly, woefully untrue that he doesn’t even know where to start. He can pack his shit up, he can get more supplies in…Albany, or whatever…

And what? Hunch his shoulders against an onslaught of animal crackers and ketchup and Sondra’s dirty socks, trying to create art?

Tegan looks like she knows more than Sam wants her to.

Leland looks like he knows nothing at all, and cares for even less than that.

…

And when he shows up on Sondra’s doorstep with two duffel bags and an art portfolio zipped into anonymous black, does it make any more sense then?

Does it matter, when Ben races outside and locks a hug around his knees that nearly fells him to the ground?

…

Tegan doesn’t let him go easily. “You’re in and out quick,” she murmurs, relishing the extent of the innuendo, and props her chin on her hand. Her elbow is balanced, in turn, on one tanned knee. She’s sitting on his desk.

Sam is all but ignoring her. He packs his toothbrush and his aftershave and a bunch of other shit he kind of forgot he owned or needed, what with sleeping on a swayback couch. On second thought, he rolls up his foam mattress pad.

He’ll be back, and not just for Leland. He’ll need to move out of here more completely, but he doesn’t have what it takes to do that today, and he’s not ready—yeah, here’s that decision part again—to move any of this, well, any _ where _ .

He still has two weeks.

He still has two weeks.

Tegan kisses him goodbye, but it’s more about taking than giving.

“Call me, you bastard,” she says, and stands on the sidewalk watching him drive away.

She probably still has his extra key.

Scratch  _ probably _ . Definitely.

…

In Schenectady, Sam considers his options. Objectively, this is a stupid thing to do: he’s here. What options, really, are left?

He parks. He gets the duffel bags, the portfolio.

He lets Ben hold onto him like that moment doesn’t have to pass. Like Sam knows what to do with that kind of open-ended affection.

Sondra stands in the doorway. She could be ten, or fifteen, or thirty-five. She has always looked the same to Sam in the ways that counted.

She says, “You can have the bedroom. I don’t want it anymore.”

With Sondra, the words are never all there is.


	8. Chapter 8

_ “Now we’re stuck in the storm / We were born to ignore.”  _ \- Don’t Take the Money,  _ Bleachers _

“Just kick him off if he gets too annoying,” Sondra says, licking her thumb to rub a stray fleck of toothpaste off the corner of Ben’s mouth. “They’re like cats. They always land on their feet.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam says gravely. He cuts his eyes at Ben in Dad’s classic I’m-watching-you style, and once the kid’s giggling, happy and relaxed, pulls out the big guns. “Hey, buddy? You need to use the bathroom, you wake me up and I’ll take you, okay?”

Ben’s actually more than capable of making the four-foot trip himself, but whatever. Small steps. It’s not like Sam’s circadian rhythm isn’t already screwed to hell, anyway. 

His nephew nods without quite meeting his eyes. Sondra ruffles a hand through Ben’s damp hair and sighs. 

“Okay? I’m looking for a verbal confirmation here.”

Sondra rolls her eyes. 

“Okay,” Ben echoes. 

Two, three a.m., Sam wakes to the familiar bitter stink and the sheets soaked cold and wet. He rolls over, does his deep calming breaths.

“Ben. What did we talk about?”

At breakfast he corners Sondra by the toaster, where she’s plucking pop tarts out with one hand and trying to buckle her uniform’s belt with the other. 

“You need to take him to a counselor or something. It’s been two weeks.”

She pauses long enough to sniff the shoulder of his T-shirt and wrinkle her nose. “Where’s your deodorant?” 

“Where’s your mouthwash?” he shoots back. “Sondra, this isn’t normal.”

She smacks the plate of pop tarts onto the table. “Yeah, that’s what a counselor would say, too. You think I don’t know they’re traumatized?”

Her breath stinks of the same cigarettes she’s always riding his ass for smoking. The acne’s spread from under her jaw to across her chin, red, flaky, simmering. Sam squashes the sudden, stupid impulse to put his arms around her. At the same time, he can’t help but think that they’re the poster children for generational decay, falling right back into the bad habits, the packaged junk food and broken-down houses their parents gave up their own dreams to rescue them from.

“Give him another week,” Sondra says. “He’s got to get tired of sleeping in his own piss.”

“He hasn’t yet,” Sam says. 

…

The morning after driving back, he sets up shop. Sondra’s bedroom has one decent, if not good, sized window facing north. No room for an easel, which Sam didn’t bother bringing, anyway; he can prop canvases against the wall.

The carpet, Sondra was only too eager to tell him, stains and stays stained no matter what you rub into it. He throws down a drop cloth. He pushes her bed to the edge of the room for maximum space. After wrangling with the twins for the wifi password (Sondra’s at work, and only Daisy remembers it), he logs into his laptop, email notifications and his “In the Zone” playlist nagging him like flashing road signs, and dicks around in front of an empty wall for half an hour.

“You apply anywhere yet?” Sondra blows in at four, Wal Mart bags rustling over one arm, her name tag stuffed into her back pocket. 

“I have a job.” He’s finally dragged himself over to ketchup-slimed dishes left in the sink from lunch—water pressure on the side sprayer’s god awful, next to useless, and once it’s turned off the faucet refuses to start back up again for a good five minutes. 

“Clearly. Lucy told me there’s this...what did she call it, give me a minute.” Sondra slings her bags onto the counter and digs her phone out of the same back pocket. “...‘hipster-aspiring’ ice cream shop down the street from her. They’re hiring. She says you’ve got the right look for it.”

“And?” he asks. Sam stares at the puddle of Dawn he’s squirting over a Franklin the Turtle plate. “What kind of look is that?”

Lucy hasn’t come over yet. He doesn’t miss her, not really, just keeps waiting for her to barge back through the door, cupcakes jingling, probably in some kind of Nancy-Drew-style plaid skirt and a matching headband...and it occurs to him that girls who dress like a picture-book version of a kindergarten teacher aren’t the kind he worries about impressing with his looks.

Much less his sister’s best-friend-cum-caregiver-cum-professional-enabler.  

“Marmaduke,” Sondra says sweetly, “you know exactly what she’s talking about.” She reaches up to flick a wayward strand of hair back behind his ear, then says, just as sweetly, “You better not have let the twins screw around with the ipad all day.”

(The voice in his head:  _ Bullshit. You always liked Nancy Drew. _ )

Either it’s a warning or a summoning; the next morning (Saturday), Sam flounders awake after nine and there she is, arms folded, plopped on the end of his bed. 

His first move is to make sure he’s completely covered from the waist down. “What the hell?”

“Good afternoon,” Lucy says, gracing him with a sour-at-the-edges smile while he yanks and piles the sheets into a barrier between them. “Sondra’s in the shower, so I’m supposed to give you the briefing.” 

“I repeat,” Sam grunts, his throat sore, silty at the back, “what the hell?”

“We’re going to a party.”  Like that explains anything. “Did you bring a dress shirt?”

“Will there be a moon bounce?”

“Oh, yeah. And a pony and a cotton candy machine! It’s more of a get-together,” Lucy clarifies. “We’re leaving at one.”

He grabs his phone. Twelve-thirty. “God _ dammit _ .”

“You and me both. Dress shirt.” When Lucy gets up, Sondra’s sagging mattress creaks. Before he can stop it, Sam’s right foot nudges further right, poking into the patch of warmth left behind. 

“And, hey, pairing that with dress pants is usually a good choice!” If she notices the move, she ignores it. Her eyes flicker around the mess he’s made of the bedroom curiously; they grow brittle as soon as they fall back on him. “I’ll be in the living room.”

He shakes his head, hoping to clear it and getting nowhere. “Uh-huh. Tell Sondra I’m not going.”

Her eyes narrow.

“I’ll watch the kids. You two go have a girls’ night or something.” He’d rather spend what’s left of the day between Ben and Daisy, who, when they do break down, are small enough to drop onto their beds and walk away from. A technique that’s never worked with Sondra.

“Samuel.” Lucy clasps her hands in front of her. She smiles again, sourness swapped out for steel. Bizarrely, it looks more genuine. “So help me God, I am not handling your sister on my own today.” 

…

The party, it turns out, is some kind of annual get-together hosted by friends of Keith’s cousin. By all laws of common decency, they can’t still be expecting Sondra to stand by her RVSP—she drops the real reason once everybody’s locked in the station wagon. 

“Kelly’s family owns a lake house,” she says, swiveling as she backs out. “Duck, Sam, I can’t see over your head. But yeah, I’m talking a cabin on a literal lake. So…” she makes the kind of noise he’d usually associate with chronic constipation. “God, it’s so stupid. Tell him, Lucy.”

The twins are whining, the windows are open, and Lucy isn’t turning, so Sam has to lean forward to hear her. 

“We play a few rounds of...uh, of Pictionary. Whoever wins the last round gets to spend a weekend at the lake house.”

“I’m winning it this year,” Sondra says. 

Lucy sighs. She sounds annoyed. With Sondra, for once. “Like you did last year?”

“Last year they were being elitist assholes. This year, Aunt Lucy, we are getting that house.”

“Jesus. What a class act you are,” Sam says. Anxiety simmers in his gut, the low-level but definite she’s-gonna-blow prickle that yanks him right back to Morgantown and McDonald’s. At the same time, the beginnings of a grin tug his mouth out of shape. Us against the elitist assholes; if it’s the only way his sister knows how to bring people together, she knows it better than anyone else. 

“What about Keith?”

Lucy nods.

Sondra shakes her head. “He won’t be there. He knows I’m going to make a scene.”

…

“Sam? In the flesh? Oh my God!” Kelly dimples up at him, all this-is-fine, we- _ understand _ eyes and a panicked smile that corners him while the rest jostle to get past—Lucy plows straight for the kitchen with two white bakery boxes, Sondra hot on her heels and the twins trailing after. Ben’s asking if he can get a cupcake yet. Daisy’s snuffling because she’s wearing a dress and not the juice-stained  _ My Mommy is Cooler Than Yours _ shirt she’s taken to like a security blanket. 

“You’re sure you’re the real deal, right?” Kelly lays a hand on his arm. She’s about Lucy’s height, skinnier and white; she radiates a kind of peppy, organic hand soap and coconut oil energy that hints at future plans to move to the country and raise chickens. Or cows. What Sam knows for sure is that she doesn’t deserve the mess that is his sister. Kelly probably knows that, too, but she soldiers on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into Sondra’s crap. 

“Sondra’s been promising to lure you upstate for...God, I guess it’s been two years now. It was good of you to come,” she confides, lowering her voice for a split-second before bobbing back up again, perky as ever. “Thanks for your painting! My husband just love it, we hung it in—”

“You sold them one of my paintings?” Sam hisses five minutes later. Vince, the husband, is starting up the grill on a bricked patio, swapping small talk with Lucy. Sondra forgot to bring the twins’ swimsuits; now Kelly’s inside, hunting for one that will fit Daisy. Ben, down to his shorts, splashes on the steps of the inground pool, chattering with a little girl in water wings. 

“That’s Rowan,” says Sondra, then, “Calm down. I was going to give it to them. Kelly just wouldn’t take it for free.”

Sam doesn’t waste time wondering exactly how that’s supposed to make him feel better. The weather’s unseasonably warm, even for May. Dried out like August. They’re still the only guests who’ve arrived (turns out Sondra bussed them in twenty minutes early), and he already feels like one of a pack of refugees graciously invited to the governor’s ball. 

“I gave those to you. If I knew you were going to pass them along to someone else—”

“You gave them to me because they weren’t good enough to stick in a gallery somewhere,” she snaps. “I didn’t sell my favorite, okay, Sam? Cool it.”

Other guests start trickling in after Kelly trots back out with a threadbare pink suit for Daisy. Word must have already spread—they’re all as wide-eyed and dimpled as Kelly. Most look like they come from around here. Niskayuna, according to his sister, is the Stepford of upstate New York, an observation that (Sam’s pretty sure) is both cruel and nowhere near as original as Sondra thinks it is—still, he’s not seeing much that would prove her wrong. Lots of moms talking about yoga and keto diets. Lots of dads (he hears his own dad’s voice in his head, clear as day) with soft hands from spending their days in an office clustered around the grill. They’re all nice enough. Ready to talk. Sondra holds her own, as always, and the kids don’t care, but Sam has nothing to say.

Neither does Lucy.

In between rounds of (freshly butchered, grass-fed beef) burgers she waves him over. “Your collar’s crooked.”

She’s stationed by the picnic table. Sam helps himself to another handful of potato chips.

Lucy waits.

“Thanks,” he crunches out through a mouthful of salt-and-vinegar. He’s turning into such a goddamn fucking slob—the collar being the smallest sign of that, and the one he’s not going to bother with out of spite. Sam can’t pretend he’d reached the pinnacle of healthy living in New York, where he did at least drag his ass over to the gym once or twice a week. These days crocodile-rolling Ben over the living room floor is the most regular exercise he gets. 

She grumbles, making as if to reach up before folding her arms instead. 

_ (“I don’t like you.”) _

Then, when she walked in right in the middle of that move, with Ben squirming against his ribs and yelling “Reverse!” as they thumped into the wall, she laughed, one of the brightest sounds he’d heard all day.

_ (“I really don’t.”) _

He should be able to take it in stride; a gentleman would have returned the favor already.

“This can’t be about some fuck—some game of Pictionary,” he says.

“Oh, no. No. It is.” Lucy glances over her shoulder like she expects to find Kelly lurking behind it (or worse, Sondra). She jerks her head at the sliding glass doors leading into the kitchen before ducking inside. Sam follows. 

“Last year she got tripped up on ‘sand trap’,” Lucy says. Actually whispers it; this time Sam’s close enough that he only needs to duck his head, and even that’s more a sort of politeness,  _ Yes, go on  _ in one gesture. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Lucy mutters anyway, shooting him a reproachful look, like he bribed her into the kitchen with potato chips. “Say you won’t be an asshole about it.”

“I think we both know you’re not going to believe me,” he snaps, too loud, though they’re the only two people in the kitchen. For now. It’s one of those cavernous, ninety-nine percent granite deals, with the other one percent being hanging pots and pans. Desserts line the countertop, cakes, tarts, peanut-butter swirled brownies, lemon peel and powdered sugar and Jell-O and Cool Whip. Vinegary pulp gums behind Sam’s teeth. 

Fucking slob.

Lucy waits. He rolls his eyes, and, this time around, gives in. “I won’t be an asshole about it. Shoot.”

“Sondra...she says nobody in your family was into golf,” she rushes to explain, before admitting. “She drew a literal sand trap. Like, a stick figure falling into a pile of sand.”

“Quicksand?” he asks, which would make it a dumb mistake, but understandably dumb.  

“No. Just sand. And then everybody laughed...I mean, nobody meant to be jerks. You talked to Kelly, she’s a total sweetheart. But it was pretty funny.”

“I’ll bet.” How his sister made it thirty-one years without learning what a sand trap is is anybody’s guess. Sam can’t help a stab of irritation that she foisted it off on their family’s shoulders—his shoulders. “Shit,” he says, “we never played golf but we didn’t live in a cave.”

“Keith knew,” Lucy says. “He was on her team, so he could have let her know, but he didn’t. He was cracking up with the rest of them.”

That doesn’t surprise Sam. The fact that it wouldn’t have surprised him ten years ago, when Keith was driving her down to Ocean City almost every other weekend, sparing no expense, or five years ago, when they were living over Keith’s best friend’s garage, Sondra ready to pop and lugging grocery bags up the stairs almost every day, stings the back of his throat like bile. 

“You should have let me knock that prick on his ass,” he says. 

“I know,” says Lucy. It’s so far off the mark from what he expected from her that Sam’s anger fades into the same stewing, mush-mouthed confusion he remembers from the second night at Sondra’s. 

“I’m the only one who has to act like an adult here,” she snaps, her face flickering, for a second, so broken and furious that he has to fight off that same urge he does with Sondra, the impulse to wrap his arms around her. Which Lucy would, if possible, appreciate even less. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t want you to slug him.  _ I  _ want to slug him.” She knots her arms across her chest, glares up at him and hisses, “You and Sondra need to—God! God, Sam, just fucking grow  _ up  _ already!”

Three thoughts blip down the wire in quick succession. 

One: What Tegan wouldn’t give to hear about the sand trap.

Two: The strawberry pattern sprinkled across Lucy’s shirt matches the pattern of strawberry slices covering one of the whipped-cream swirled cakes on the countertop almost exactly. 

Three: Sondra hates Keith; she used to love him. Sam hates Keith; he used to look up to him. Lucy’s never so much as liked Keith. She wants to watch him burn. 

It was written across her face. And it’s a very different look from every one she’s ever given Sam.

_ (Really. I really don’t.) _

He says, “You about to short-circuit? Melt?”

Lucy’s glare hardens to a scowl.

He says, “I didn’t know you could say ‘fuck’.” 

Then melts, just a fraction. “Fuck you,” Lucy says, then snorts, her arms unknotting. Halfway through the snort bubbles into a laugh. 

Sam smiles—maybe he laughs, too—(because he’s more glad than he knows, realizing she doesn’t hate him, not completely) he’s about to say something (something, who knows what yet)—

“Are you Uncle Sam?”

He turns around, and there’s some little redheaded girl in the doorway, dragging Daisy along by one arm. Daisy looks sullen, the redhead looks hopeful. They’re both soaking wet. 

“The one and only,” Sam says. Behind him, Lucy giggles. Reluctantly, maybe, but it is what it is. 

“Okay,” the little girl says. She tugs at the end of her braid. “We need someone big to bounce us on the trampoline.”

…

Trampolines and full stomachs don’t mix. 

“Are you going to throw up?” Lucy’s perched on the couch, next to his feet, her face a fraction more concerned than Sondra’s. Which isn’t saying much. 

“Not on the carpet,” Rowan adds helpfully. “Mommy just cleaned it.”

Sam squints at the semicircle of solemn kids clustered around him, then between Lucy and Sondra. “I’m fine,” he says. 

“You should turn over,” says the redhead. Everly. “I lie on my tummy when I’m about to throw—”

“I am not—”

“Just in case!” sings Kelly, racing in with a stainless steel salad bowl she plops by the foot of the couch. “I did just vacuum,” she says apologetically. “Do you want some Pepto Bismol, maybe?”

“I’m fine,” Sam repeats. His stomach replies with a half-hearted, molten heave. Somehow, Sondra’s not turning out to be the most ridiculous party crasher today. She should thank him for that. 

“Thanks for taking one for the team, man,” a guy offers from just outside the doorway. Everly’s dad, Sam thinks. He should really remember his name. 

Ben fidgets. “I peed in the pool,” he says, without prompting, and that’s somehow the signal for everyone to clear out. The kids disappear down to the basement playroom, everyone else drifts toward more food and beer and the apparently long-awaited round of Pictionary. 

“You’re going to keep an eye on him? Make sure he doesn’t barf all over the rug?” Sondra asks.

“Um…” Lucy glances at Sam. “For a few minutes. I guess?”

“Appreciate it, peach.” She hangs over the back of the couch to smooch at the top of Lucy’s head, then circles round to him. “I’m calling you if I need help with drawing, okay?” Sondra presses the same businesslike kiss to Sam’s forehead. “Stay sharp.”

As soon as her footsteps clop into what Kelly called the “fancy family room”, Lucy says, “I’m getting a cupcake.”

He’s not sure if he expects her to come back, so when he feels her weight plop back down to the same spot, right beside his feet (it’s a decent-sized couch), Sam doesn’t mention that vanilla buttercream is about the last thing he wants to be smelling right now. He opens his eyes, realizing that at some point he closed them, to see Lucy tucking her feet up under her, a paper plate balanced in her lap.

She pats his foot. “You can be really charming when you want to be, Sam. Kudos.”

Well. Take what you can get, and all that. “You made those?” Sam mutters. Bile burps up to the back of his throat. 

“This one?” Lucy holds up a cupcake topped with a swirl of sugared orange peel. “Yeah, I think so. Half the batch is stuff I decorated. The sloppier half.” She shrugs, takes a bite. “It’s orange cre—sorry, sorry!”

He honestly didn’t think it would get this bad.

Then again, of the two of them he’s always been the champion hurler; when he was eight or nine, sick as a dog and also pissed at Sondra for something neither of them remembers, though they both pretend they do, he walked up behind her while she watching the TV in the family room and spewed Ginger Ale creamy with mushed saltines all over her hair. This time it’s a sour, steaming pulp of potato chips, and it lands in the bowl, thank God. A steam-cleaning bill isn’t something Sam’s prepared to worry about right now.

Not that he can worry about much. Think about much.

He feels her hand on his ankle. She’s got small hands. Wide, but small, Sam thinks, levering himself up—his head’s pounding, his throat scrubbed through with steel wool—nope, this isn’t happening, no, he’s not the one who’s going to end up puked-out and passed out on someone else’s couch—

“Not your fault,” he rasps, sitting up—and Lucy must see it coming before he feels the next wave choking up his throat, because she lunges forward, snapping, “No, Sam—”

And that’s how he splatters whatever’s left in his stomach over another girl’s hair. 


	9. Chapter 9

_ “I met a boy / who never knew the taste of haze / to him the whole world is a stage” – Tessa Violet _

“You need more sunscreen.”

Lucy’s only half-listening, but for once, she thinks that Sam looks like he doesn’t need anything. He’s hunched over in the crumbly freshwater sand, a whistle of a breeze lifting his hair, and he kind of seems…peaceful?

Lucy, for her part, has spent the morning trying not to sneak glances at the pale, muscled planes of his back and chest.

Admittedly, she hasn’t been trying very hard.

Sondra repeats herself, and Sam submits to her brutal ministrations across his shoulders and neck.

Lucy chews her lip. Sam has big hands. It would take him three seconds to spread sunscreen to the dip of her swimsuit, curved midway down her spine. Strong fingers, too. He’s an artist, after all.

She’s distracted from this dangerous train of thought by the twins’ shrieks. They’ve taken to the water like little minnows.

Sondra didn’t just do this for herself, Lucy knows. Didn’t snatch victory from the jaws of humiliation, wild kids and a puking little (big) brother) in tow, just for revenge.

Sondra stands like she always does, shoulders back, bracing for a punch, but her face is soft as she watches the twins bobbing and splashing in the shallows.

Lucy won’t say aloud what she can see of Sondra’s heart. It’s there if you know what to look for, like the C-section scar below her brown polka-dot bikini top.

“You gonna swim?” Sam asks.

Belatedly, Lucy realizes he’s talking to her.

And yes, theoretically, she is. She has her suit on under her t-shirt and shorts. She doesn’t care if Sondra and the kids see her, of course, and she  _ shouldn’t _ care if Sam sees her, and—

_ Doughy. _ She’s doughy around the middle, is what Amy always said.

She shrugs, aware that two sets of perceptive dark eyes are drilling into her.

“ _ I  _ thought I might go skinny-dipping,” Sondra announces, in the pause that follows.

Sam grimaces on cue. “Oh, God, Scully.  _ No _ .”

Sondra winks at Lucy and then sprints after the twins, who are chasing each other along the shore. Sondra looks younger when she runs.

This, obviously, leaves Lucy alone with Sam. She plucks at her t-shirt.

“Want a beer?” He gestures towards the battered red cooler Sondra had hauled out of her closet. Sondra has started going in her old room again, just sometimes.

Lucy can’t help wrinkling her nose. “It’s eleven A.M.”

“Suit yourself.” He reaches for one, all taut sinew between arm and shoulder.  _ Rippling _ . Lucy feels the wind pick up, fanning her warm cheeks.

“Guess lake really means lake,” Sam observes. He opens the beer with a pop and hiss. The water stretches out before them, green as glass, hemmed by a murky army of spruces on the distant opposites shore.

“Sondra’s always wanted to come here,” Lucy says.

(Sondra has always wanted a lot of things.)

“She likes water,” Sam says.

“And you?” There’s no denying the existence of a truce between them. Sam’s been almost civil since Lucy helped mop up his vomit.

“I’m more of a city guy.”

“Easier to blend in?”

His eyes spark, not quite suspicious, but he answers amiably enough. “I guess I like how the world’s always moving.”

She supposes she should cut him more slack for everything he’s sacrificed by coming up here. She settles in the sand beside him, at a comfortable distance.

“So, when’s your next…art thingy?”

“Art thingy?” She catches a flicker of Sondra’s trademark smirk on his lip.

“So, sue me!” Lucy throws up her hands. “Just trying to make conversation.”

Sam scratches the back of his neck and grins somewhere in the direction of his feet. “I have a commission due the end of June.”

That’s not so far away, anymore. Time is moving, just like the city he loves. “What’s it…of?”

Sam tilts his head so that his hair falls away from his forehead.  _ Handsome  _ isn’t the right word for him; it’s much too simple.

And here is the trouble, the state of Lucy’ world, the mystery under glass-green water—

—nothing feels simple anymore.

Oh, sure, it started at the party, what with the vomit-cleanup. She felt sorry for him, and that was almost the nicest feeling she’d levied in his direction since he’d arrived in Schenectady, reeking of weed. And then there was the First Thing, when she stopped by one day to pick up the twins for their post-K summer program, and almost crashed into Sam on his morning run.

Sweat looked unfairly good on him. His overlong hair was plastered to his temples, and he was breathing fast. She could see the pulse throbbing in his neck. He hadn’t shaved yet. Lucy gaped, and simultaneously wondered what a day’s worth of stubble would feel like under her palm.

“Hey,” he said, jerking out an earbud. “What’s up?”

Lucy raised her eyes from his chest to his face. “Um. Uh. Kids. I’m picking up the kids.”

“Cool,” he said, still panting a bit. “See ya.”

And then he was off, and she was  _ not _ watching him leave, this was  _ so very stupid _ —

Ok, so Sondra’s brother is attractive. So what? Sondra’s very pretty, whether she likes it or not. Why should it matter so much that Sam’s arms and shoulders and—and—surprisingly  _ plush _ lips have taken up some of Lucy’s brain-space?

_ Because I don’t  _ have  _ brain-space to spare _ . That’s what she tells herself, furiously, and she almost manages to put it, and him, out of her mind entirely. Until the Second Incident, at least.  

Problem is, Lucy can’t eat all of her leftover cupcakes. This arguably the basis for most of her visits to Sondra’s: cupcakes, cookies, croissants. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’ll grab some veggies form the farmer’s market next time, too.”

Sondra always scoops up a finger-full of buttercream and rolls her eyes. “Don’t worry about it. Kids have my metabolism. Only Keith was prone to fatassery.”

When Lucy comes by on her way to Alessandra’s, Sondra and the twins aren’t even there. She opens the front door and nearly steps on one of the hundred sheets of paper that litter the living room floor.

“What the—” she starts, then stops.

They’re sketches.

She sees what looks like a spiral staircase, viewed from above, and then realizes it’s the angry iris of an eye. There’s another that is a face as façade, the gothic towers of a cathedral somehow transformed into drooping eyebrows and a dark, hollow gaze.

Surrealism, then. But there are some that are vividly realistic—a woman with a baby’s arms around her neck. Lucy stares at the curve of the woman’s shoulder, the way her hair hides her face.

“Shit, I’ll pick it all up!” calls a voice, Sam’s voice, from the other room.

He must think she’s Sondra, kids in tow.

She almost wishes she  _ were _ . She feels like an intruder, even though this isn’t actually his home.

Sam bounds into the living room and skids to a halt.

“I just came to drop off some baked stuff,” Lucy mumbles. One of them has to fill the terrible silence.

He has ink all over his hands, a charcoal smudge on his right cheek. In his hand there’s a canvas, not a sketch, and it’s the mother and child writ large. Lucy’s heart twists again.

“Grief,” Sam says, here and now, on the beach, with the wind and the water and the trees trembling around them. “It’s about grief.”

Somehow, she already knew that.

He digs into the sand with his thumb, carving out a tiny, snail-scale road. “What’d you think?”

“Of—your sketches?”

“Yeah.”

Well. This is a day of firsts.

Lucy swallows. Lucy knows how to pipe stars and rosettes, knows the trick to keeping cursive lettering ganache-smooth. But art—the abstract, the chaotic, the wild—that’s not her. Even when she’s breaking free, she needs a pattern.

“They seemed really personal,” is what bursts out of her mouth, and she really,  _ really  _ hopes Sam knows she doesn’t mean it as an insult.

(When did she start caring what Sam knows or doesn’t know?)

Sam doesn’t answer, just lets his hair fall in his face again. Insulted, then. Lucy swallows down a lump in her throat. But in another moment Sam rises up, sand flecked along his calves, and says, “We should go swimming.”

Out on the lake, Sondra and the twins are floating side by side. Lucy thought Daisy might be afraid of the water. She’s glad she was wrong.

“I don’t know…”

Her hesitation makes Sam fold in on himself again.

Lucy owes him, maybe, after saying his drawings seemed personal.  _ Crap _ , she just can’t give a compliment, can she?

She pulls her t-shirt off. This swimsuit is sunny yellow, and her boobs look fine in it,  _ great _ actually, and everything else…

…will just have to  _ deal _ .

“Race you,” she announces, with a little edge of their old animosity. What happened to that animosity? How has it drifted out with the tide?

The sand is soft under her feet. The water is sun-warm. She beats Sam because he wasted a minute gaping after her, and then because he…

No. She will not admit that he  _ let  _ her win anything.

When he catches up to her, he dives for her and all of a sudden, his arms are around her waist,  _ shit _ , those  _ arms _ , and he’s lifting her up and  _ throwing her _ , and she’s screaming and he’s laughing and she’s flying—

It’s all so simple, after all.

The water closes over her and she sinks, mermaid-like, just basking in the weightlessness of the water above and below her. No need to process…anything else.

This, Lucy realizes, is a moment she’s going to keep.

She used to write them down, the moments. She remembers being eight, and watching  _ Mulan _ , and getting all excited because now the other kids weren’t going to make fun of her eyes, or something. And she wrote down all the things she liked about the movie theater, even down to the smell of stale popcorn, and she folded up the college-ruled paper (Mom always bought the college-ruled notebooks) and tucked it into a stationary box with purple hydrangeas on the cover.

She wonders where that box is now. Amy probably chucked it in one of her purges.

(But Mom left first.)

(Lucy never forgets that.)

Sure, as an adult—which will never  _ not _ sound weird—she’s kitschy. She has too many pairs of earrings and she never throws away her perfume bottles when she should. She keeps coupons in a little basket on her counter and it’s almost overflowing.

And yes, OK, she keeps moments. She keeps the moments that make her feel weightless, whether or not they last.

When she resurfaces, Sam is still laughing. Lucy headbutts him in those annoying abs of his and he topples like a tree, if trees were gangly and shaggy-topped. Hmph. They kind of are.

A lot has already happened.  _ A lot of mistakes _ , as one might say, as  _ she _ might say, in a wiser moment,  _ were made _ .

Sam doesn’t let go of her, so they go down together, and this time, she ends up with her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms draped over his shoulders. His hands on her hips are warmer than the water.

His eyes are close. Close, and hazel-flecked.

Or that might just be the sunshine.

(They don’t say anything.)

(They don’t let go.)

Someone clears their throat.

Sondra is five feet away, eyebrows at an all-time high.

Sam drops Lucy in the water. She kind of thinks she should just let herself drown.

But breathing has a way of taking precedence, so she plunges up again and pushes her sodden bangs off her forehead.

“Y’all hungry?” Sondra asks. Her eyebrows haven’t descended. Sam’s blush is working its way down his neck, staining the line of his collarbone.

…

The twins keep up all the conversation while they eat. Lucy’s grateful.

They have turkey sandwiches, tucked against cold-packs, one of which looks like Dory from  _ Finding Nemo _ . Sondra tugs her bikini strap up from where it’s slipped down on her shoulder and slashes Sam and Lucy with yet another glance.

She’s not saying much, though. That’s the worrisome thing. Sondra is a fiend when she goes quiet.

Lucy is starting to wish that she hadn’t agreed to spend the whole weekend here. If only Alessandra would call her up right the hell now and tell her that she had to work 24/7 for the rest of her life.

“So, Lucy.” Sondra stuffs a crust into her mouth and talks around it. “Your cleavage is gorgeous. Sam, don’t you think it’s gorgeous?”

“Mom, what’s cleavage?” Ben asks immediately.

Sondra starts laughing, full belly-laughing, rolling back onto the sand. Sam lunges forward, throwing a towel over her face.

“What’s cleavage?” Ben asks again.

“Never mind,” Lucy says, hastily handing him a snack bag of chips. Sondra is still laughing. Sam has never looked more like death itself.

…

Sondra leaves them alone for the rest of the day. Mostly. The lakehouse is—spacious as hell, and that’s enough to keep Sondra focused on other matters, like gloating about Keith’s prissy asshole relatives and how much they all must be fuming right now.

“We could just not talk about them, y’know,” Sam points out, while Sondra cackles over the balcony that looks out on the cathedral-ceiling living room.

“Oh, I’m carving my name  _ all  _ over their shit,” she tells him. “These bitches are going to remember me.”

Fortunately, her children are busy brushing their teeth during this interlude.

“I’ll take the couch,” Sam announces. Lucy grits her teeth for an innuendo from Sondra, but Sondra just shrugs, eyes inscrutable.

“OK. There’s like, five rooms, Duke. You could literally take your pick.”

He shifts from one foot to the other. He’s so tall, and always looks like he’s trying not to be. Lucy wishes she didn’t keep remembering his laugh, what his heartbeat felt like, so close to hers.

What was she  _ thinking _ ? She doesn’t even like this guy!

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “I feel like…I don’t want to…”

“Stop being such a pu—” Sondra cuts off, mid-jeer, when Ben and Daisy trail out of the bathroom. Daisy is in her nightie, but Ben isn’t wearing a shirt.

“I’m a man now,” he announces, rubbing his stomach proudly.

Sondra chuckles. “Whatever, bud. Let’s get you two to bed.” She herds them through one of the five doors.

Lucy stands halfway up the stairs, hand curled around the railing. “Goodnight, I guess.”

_ I guess? Oh my  _ God.

Sam doesn’t meet her eyes. She watches the lines of his throat work, like he’s visibly forming the words. “Hey,” he manages at last. “About—uh, about today.”

“Yeah?” It comes out in a squeak. She hopes Sondra isn’t listening behind the twins’ door.

“Sorry.”

She wasn’t expecting that. “What?”

“I was weird.” He’s still not looking at her. “Forget it.”

_ Weird _ is such a flat little word for what it was, arms and legs and eyes and sunshine. It makes Lucy angry, almost, to hear him dismiss it like that.

“Yeah, well, you’re weird. Makes sense!” she chirps, knife-sharp, and heads up the steps without looking back.


	10. Chapter 10

  _“Now I’m running and I can’t stop anywhere I go / I think about it every day and night I can’t let go” –_ Rollercoaster, _Bleachers_

“Not the shoulders.” Sam shrugs, sunburn-prickles shivering up his back.

Ben’s fingers, damp and gritty, frosted over with sand, unpeel and Sam feels his weight slide off, thump down to the towel. He roots behind Sam for a minute before emerging with an old garden trowel and a red plastic bucket. “You should’ve listened to Mommy.”

Like he hadn’t let Sondra slather him with the cheapest sunscreen she could find, SPF -0.1.

“Out of the mouths of babes.” She squats a few feet away, tugging at the bottom of her swimsuit with one hand and packing one of Daisy’s sandcastle molds with the other. “I can’t believe we forgot to bring aloe.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But I can believe you forgot it.”

She rolls her eyes.

It’s overcast today anyway. Sam’s slathered sunscreen on thicker—he always does the second day—and draped a towel across his shoulders for good measure. He flicks the pages of one of the books Sondra tossed last minute into her splitting beach bag without reading them.

He thought about bringing his sketchbook down, trying to capture the way Ben tromps into the ankle-high waves or the set of Daisy’s jaw while she works on her sandcastle, moats and bridges and barriers. He didn’t. It’s something you do when you want people to get a load of what a dedicated artist you are, and anyway, his family all make lousy models. They know when you’re sketching them, catch on too fast.

“Baby, look at those waves. They can’t reach this far,” Sondra is saying.

She’s never been scared of waves. Family trips to Rehoboth, or Bethany—trips that only happened two, three times that Sam remembers, and never after they’d actually settled in Delaware—it was Sondra, always Sondra, her nails digging into his arm, marching them both deeper and deeper. “One more step, come _on,_ Sam—”

She’s saying something else.

He jerks his head up. “Huh?”

“You look like death sunburned over.” Sondra snags the back of Ben’s swim trunks before he can start digging too close to Daisy’s carefully constructed mote. “Over there, dude—we’re good. Go inside.”

Sam eyes her flatly. “I’m good,” he says, just as flatly.

“God, look—she doesn’t go for this high school bullshit act. I’m just saying.”

“Good for her.”

“Lucy is a woman of substance.”

“So you’re an expert on that? Substance?”

She blinks razor-fast. Her jaw tightens like a rubber band. Both Daisy and Ben look up, faces dropping slack and uneasy. “I’m not trash.”

Sam’s skin shudders again, goosebumps swarming up though the day’s soup-thick. Stretched thin and ready to peel, ready to burst off him. _Stop pushing,_ he almost tells her, _stop giving me that goddamn face._ That bitchy little smile, always just for him. Sondra’s a master of high school bullshit.

But she isn’t smiling now.

He gets to his feet, book splaying down open-faced, the towel sliding off. _I’m going. See?_

“Skin cancer,” she snaps after him. “You’ve got all those weird moles already.”

_Thanks, Mom._ Another thing he doesn’t say. Hasn’t tried that one since the funeral. Isn’t going to, even if it means taking the porch steps two at a time, nearly tripping over a bright purple pool noodle. Sam yanks at the back door, slams it open, then closed.

“Sondra send you in?”

“Mmm.” He’s not up to much else.

“Great, because I couldn’t tell.” From behind a kitchen table cluttered with a baking tray, a roll of tin foil, a can of Pam and a bowl of glopped-stiff batter, Lucy has an almost unobstructed view of the path scribbling up from the beach. “So I was one of those kids who always wanted a brother or a sister,” she says, just as dry. “You guys are making me question that.”

Took her long enough. Sam crosses to the sink. “You don’t have to do all this,” he says.

“I don’t mind.”

“That’s not—” he turns around, hands still damp and dribbling suds. “It’s too much,” Sam forces out, the skin along his spine a livewire. “Lucy. You need to get away from us. Come on.”

She pinches up a glob of batter, smashes it flat. “It’s just for the weekend.”

“Don’t do that. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Is this about yesterday?”

Sam prays for either Ben or Daisy to kick sand in Sondra’s eyes. “No,” he says. _You know that, too._

“Because if you don’t want things to be weird—” she pinches up another glob, doesn’t look at him. “This is not helping.”

He has no idea what to say to that until it’s half-out already, too much to take back. “So what, would it kill you to be on your own? Just once?”

Lucy looks up. And he’s caught, snagged on the memory of yesterday, the throb of the sun and the water warm, silt-slicked over them. The solidness, the steady weight hiked up against him, and the soft press of her stomach to his before she sucked in a deep breath, straightened up and pulled away.

He imagines it, softer, paler than the rest of her. The panels of her suit pleating up under his fingers.

...Fuck.

“I can’t figure you out,” she’s saying.

“Yeah, well.” His trunks are an abandoned pair of Keith’s, worn soft, almost thin, in places. Sam digs his hands into the pockets. “Likewise.”

Lucy rolls her eyes. Then—maybe before she can convince herself otherwise—she nods at the fridge. “There’s a pack of Hershey’s Kisses in there. Grab it for me?”

…

“Sorry.” He’s bent double over the toilet bowl, stomach still working in a swirl of yellow acid. Dribbles of it rasp up Sam’s throat. He spits, knees crimping against the tile.

The water’s running. Lucy hunches over the sink, towards the mirror. She’s picking soggy chunks out of her bangs with her fingers, her face about as pasty as his.

“Shit,” Sam says. He spits again. Cuts his eyes sideways and sees how it’s dribbled down her neck, past her collar. “Your shirt.”

“Oh, God—” she twists, trying to size up the damage; Sam finds himself on his feet, somehow, toilet paper crumpled in his hand.

“Here.” His fingers fumble, pale and clammy. Blot the back of her neck, then lurch back to the toilet—

“Bile.” When he looks up Lucy holds two folded squares out to him, her knees almost nudging his side, her cheeks suddenly pink. “It’s the worst.”

…

“Peanut Butter Kisses! You’ve never had them?”

Sam shakes his head.

_“Sam.”_ She shakes her head back, a smear of chocolate dotting the corner of her mouth. “I mean, what do they know about good food in New York if they’re not selling these on every corner?”

He works the scouring pad around the inside of the mixing bowl. “I’ve never seen anyone selling cookies on the corner.”

“U-huh. My point stands.” Lucy gives the tabletop one last wipedown, then wrings her dishcloth out in the sink. “Anyway. You like peanut butter, right?”

He shrugs.

“Dude!”

“Roof of the mouth,” he says. “Can’t do it.”

“You do realize when you bake it in a cookie the texture completely changes.”

“I’m aware.”

She snorts, flicks her eyes to the window—they’re side-by-side at the sink, almost hip-to-hip—and her eyebrows sail up. “Oh. Here they come.”

Sam grinds the scouring pad against a rock-solid lump of batter before looking out. His shoulders prickle red-hot. “Something’s up.”

Lucy’s already turning, shaking her hands dry as the door creaks open and Daisy darts through, pigtails trickling down her back. “Hey you!” she says, not bright this time so much as brisk. “Cookies are in the oven.”

“Grampy’s on the phone,” Daisy blurts, ignoring Lucy completely. She stares at Sam.

“Your grandpa?” he hears himself ask. Like there’s any doubt.

Daisy nods. “He’s making Mommy mad.”

“What a surprise,” Lucy mutters. Then she hurries to the door. “Hey, Ben?”

“Come inside, bud,” Sam says, on his way out. Behind him Lucy asks the twins to watch the cookies for her “in case the timer doesn’t go off” before the door slides shut and she’s on the porch with him.

Them.

“—do about it. I don’t get home until Monday.” Sondra’s pacing barefoot, her flip-flops and everything else forgotten on the beach. As he watches she spikes her heel on one of the boards, then hops in place, face twisted, mouthing an entire vocabulary of curses in under two seconds. “Yeah, I’m sure me packing everything up and dragging the kids back home a day early will make all the difference,” she snaps. Then, “Don’t snap at _me!_ ”

She bounces one last time, her cleavage jiggling damp and cold. Sam looks away. Dad never wanted Sondra in bikinis, and thanks to them he overheard enough screaming matches on the subject to cast a pall over entire summers. _Don’t want you spilling out of your top_ —he can still hear that, and it still makes him want to bury himself underground, or punch them both square in the gut.

“Yeah, like I’m getting stuck in the middle of that shit. Call him up yourself.”

His eyes jerk back to her. _It’s okay,_ Sondra mouths, her face softening a little, before she flicks her bikini strap up one shoulder and says, “What’s wrong with you? No.”

She’s crumbling, he can see that. And Sam’s about to step up, take the phone from her (he can hear Dad already, the tinny chatter, and it’s not the same but it’s close enough to be too much), until he stops, hands in his pockets, frozen and furious, and Lucy, as always, beats him to the punch.

“Come on, Bee,” she whispers, sliding the phone from between Sondra’s chin and shoulder. Lucy squares her shoulders—she’s so tiny, Sam thinks, like he hasn’t already seen her with Keith, with him. So tiny, how the hell is she supposed to go up against that? “Hi, Mr. York? This is Lucy.”

Sondra blinks—she looks orphaned without her phone. She turns to Sam, the curl of a smile wilting off her lips. “Balls of steel,” his sister says.

She’s ready to cry, or almost ready to. Sam looks around for a beach towel, sees a damp one still fluttering over the railing, and goes to snag it. “Yeah,” he says, handing it over. “I know.”

…

The twins are sprawled out in front of the TV, feet kicked up into the air. “The timer isn’t broken,” Ben says. “Aunt Lucy isn’t good with ovens.”

“Oh yeah?” Sondra steps over them and sinks into the couch, damp bathing suit, damp towel, and all. “Babies,” she says, softer than Sam’s heard her say anything. “C’mere.”

Daisy crawls into her lap, Ben nudges into her side. They’re all questions, and Sondra fields each one like a pro. She got sand in her eyes. Grampy’s just worried because he didn’t know they were at the beach. Sam leaves them there, jumbled together, the TV muttering Disney Channel.

Lucy’s still on the porch, pacing now, just like Sondra. One hand jammed in her pocket, her face pulled tight.

Sam catches her eye. _Need any help?_ he mouths.

She hesitates, considers. Then mouths back, _Please._

He takes the phone from her. It’s warm from Sondra’s ear, from Lucy’s. He holds it to his own for a minute, listening for the breath, the familiar rasp on the other end. Waits, listens, chewing on his lip.

“Hello?” Like a mouthful of gravel.

Sam hangs up.

…

“Who?”

“Mariah?” Lucy bends to grab the red bucket. “I guess she works with one of Keith’s sisters or something?”

Sam shakes his head. “They weren’t running wild,” he says.

“I mean, no more than all the other kids, right? They’re _five,”_ Lucy growls, not at him. “But I actually think it was the swimsuit thing,” she admits. “Keith—you know him better than I do.”

He slings one of the forgotten beach towels around his neck. “No handouts.” The imitation he hasn’t rolled out in years, the one Keith hated and Sondra swore was pitch-perfect.

Lucy sticks out her tongue and slashes a finger across her throat.

Sam smiles, though it slides off about as quick as it comes. His sister’s been known to forget Christmas presents, concert tickets; two kiddie swimsuits are nothing by her standards. It always pissed Keith off. Once he bitched for five minutes over Sondra asking one of his sisters if she could spare a disposable diaper. “I didn’t know he and Dad were still talking.”

“They’re not. Your dad said Jordan messaged him on Facebook.”

Jordan is Keith’s oldest sister. Of all of them she likes Sondra best. That’s not saying much. “I didn’t know you and Dad talked.”

She shrugs that off, shoots him a quick, sideways look before hunkering down to dig one of the plastic molds out of the sand. It’s too late. He can see she’s already flushing. “And apparently,” Lucy says, “you and I were, um… acting suspiciously in the bathroom. That got out too.”

His own flush simmers underneath the sunburn. “Are you serious?”

“No, Sam,” she snaps. “I just wanted to see if you could get any redder.”

“Fuck,” he snaps back, “this isn’t high school.”

“It looks bad, though,” Lucy says quietly. She keeps her head bent—Sam wants her to look up at him, right now, and he thinks if she does he’ll have nothing left to say, just bursts of gummed-over anger, raised voices. “If she lets people like that hang around her kids—”

“Shit. _Fuck.”_

“Yeah,” she says, even quieter. “I know.”

…

Lucy’s bangs are damp, and he still catches more than a whiff of puke off her. There have been times Sam’s felt like more of an asshole than this. He’s pretty sure. For now he can’t remember them. “You look fine.”

“Liar.” She raises her hands, gesturing in the air inches from his face like she’s trying to shape it back into something presentable. “Game faces,” Lucy says. “We can do this, right?”

Not like they have any other option. “We can do this.”

“We’re adults. We’re winning at life.”

“No more vomit.”

“No more vomit!” She forces a smile. Then she closes her eyes, huffs out a deep breath. “Just pray it doesn’t turn into Boozy Pictionary,” Lucy says before unlocking the door. Her collar’s messed up in the back. Sam almost reaches out to fix it himself. Almost.

…

It had to be ruined. Like all family vacations, going sour by day two—if it hadn’t been Dad, it would’ve been him and Sondra, some time tonight if not right there on the beach, or one of the twins, pitching a fit over cereal, wetting the bed. Or him and Lucy.

They carry the towels and pails and other assorted kid-and-beach-related crap back up the path, leaving Daisy’s half-finished sand castle behind. Sondra didn’t offer to help. She’s inside, on her phone again, forcing the kids to wait until the cookies cool.

“If this was something we really needed to worry about,” Sam points out, “Keith would’ve brought it up as soon as he found out.”

“Great. I guess I’ll just stop worrying now.” Lucy dumps her armful by the porch steps in a rattle of plastic and stomps up ahead of him. She’s wearing short-shorts, maybe not the best look on her, but the hems ride up close under the curve of her—and Sam stops himself right there, because seriously? This is where your mind’s going right now? Dickhead. “I’m not saying it isn’t bullshit,” she snaps, grabbing one of the towels from him, “because it absolutely is, but you think that’s going to stop Keith from making trouble for her?”

Sam shakes his head.

“U-huh. Not even like he wants full cus—goddamnit.” Lucy’s hung the towel over the porch railing to dry. Now she props her elbows on the railing, scrubs her hands over her face, and makes a sound like a jammed garbage disposal. “I just wanted to help. You just wanted to help,” she adds, no edge there, not this time. “And now we’re making trouble for her, too.”

Sam shakes out the other towel before slinging it over the railing, next to hers. “It’s bullshit,” he repeats. “Like, yeah, I’m sure you’d be sticking you tongue down my throat fifteen seconds after I barfed.”

Her hands drop. Lucy’s flush deepens. “Who says I’d ever do that?” she demands.

“Not me!” He sounds too much like Keith, too much like Dad. Ready to break something. Sam latches his hands to the railing. “Sorry.”

“It’s ridiculous,” she says, not looking at him. “I mean, come on.”

He knows he’s asking for trouble. “Come on what?”

“You? Me?” Lucy makes another one of her uncategorizable sounds. This time it sounds a little closer to a snort. And resigned.

“Hey,” he says without thinking, “don’t sell yourself short.”

“Are you,” she says, eyes still fixed straight ahead, “fucking kidding me?”

A pause. An icy one while Sam debates going with his gut, sizzling and spitting like an egg in a frying pan, overloaded with her already, and with Sondra, and Keith, and his dad’s voice, or—

He misses Tegan, all of a sudden, Tegan who he hasn’t thought about more than three or four times in the past few weeks, Tegan and the way she always swears loudly and a little self-consciously, like a kid who’s just figured out she can. Tegan who would have cut all this mess to the curb ages ago, who definitely wouldn’t have gotten up at six in the morning to buy all the ingredients for Peanut Butter Kisses just because Daisy and Ben asked, who never lets herself become too tangled up in anyone or anything.  

—or letting it go. They’ve always had bigger things to worry about; what is this shit?

“Sorry,” he says again. “I’m an asshole.”

Another pause.

“Me too,” Lucy says, and when he looks over she’s looking at him, too, and rolling her eyes. “God, dude, it’s not a contest.”

“You’re not an asshole.”

Her mouth quirks. “You barely know me, Sam.”

Coming from her even yesterday it would have been a jibe, the kind of screw-you they can’t seem to stop throwing at each other, whether they want to or not. But today it’s… softer. Companionable, even.

Yesterday was weird, today’s been weirder, tomorrow will be worse. Sam loops an arm around her shoulders before he can talk himself out of it, not really pulling her in, just letting it rest there. For at least half a minute he freezes like a bump on a log, thinking, what the hell is this, what are you doing, but Lucy doesn’t shrug him off. It stretches along, and he’s remembering the flash of her legs in the water, the sharp curve of her laugh, her eyes and her arms—

It stretches along, and there’s something quieter, something closer, in this. Maybe. Sam doesn’t think about it. He knows it’ll disappear if he does.


End file.
